


A Wild-Goose Chase

by cuddlebone



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Animal Familiars, End of the World, Kinda Magical Realism, M/M, Prophecies and Curses and Other Magical Things, Turbulence with a Happy Ending, steampunk-ish?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 06:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14949705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlebone/pseuds/cuddlebone
Summary: An adventure due north.





	A Wild-Goose Chase

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: not much angst! loss of parents and briefly mentioned death. brief mentions of bones and the undead. brief mentions of the underworld. some parts may be unsettling, but nothing graphic or gross. 
> 
> a wild-goose chase, is, by definition, "a foolish and hopeless search for or pursuit of something unattainable".
> 
> it has been 8 very long, stressful months when it comes to plotting out this one. 4 months spent writing it. so the only thing i ask of you is to read it slowly and carefully, because i've paid plenty of attention to the details in the plot, the setting, and these four boys, and i can only hope you will, too. please, please, please enjoy!

In the realm of gods, monarchs, and demons- _north_ , where ice and lichen are the only things spread over the barren tundra, and colours dance across starless skies- Soonyoung sits lofty on a throne. A throne of human bones, ones he’s unearthed with his very two hands. On his head is a diadem that doesn’t quite fit right, and it never quite will, because it’s not quite _his_. But he’ll readjust it as many times as it takes to get it to stop slipping down his slick, snow-speckled hair.

 

Junhui can be found in this realm, too. He sits on a rocky hillside, blooming among the fluttering wildflowers and the trembling green weeds. He has his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hands, absolutely oblivious to the power he holds in them.

 

In the world of humans, ghosts, and magicians alike, where grey cities sprawl, full of dull people with even duller familiars, and people know not of the wrath brewing in the north and what the electricity in the air means, Jihoon sits in his study. He looks at a map of his world, but he’s not really absorbing what he’s seeing- he’s thinking of when and how he’ll fill the hollowness in the left side of his chest, even if it’s a topic he’ll never admit he’s given any thought.

 

Wonwoo sits in his laboratory three stories down, nursing a burnt fingertip. It’s the result of tinkering with one of his steam-powered machines, one he doesn’t yet know will play a part in flipping his and Jihoon’s lives upside-down. For better or worse, that is.

 

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and storm clouds gather and brew. But none of that is new; the world has been forecast to be ending for a while now, and none of them know how important they are to (let alone how big their roles will be in) both its collapse and rebuild.

 

 

“Jihoon, quick, what are three impossible things?”

 

Jihoon rubs his eyes and almost elbows the jar of bergamot marmalade off the table. Their breakfast table is, as always, stacked high with towers of books, some with pages wrinkled and tattered from coffee spills, others speckled with burns from Jihoon’s cigar ashes. “Hmm… true love, true happiness, and understanding this prophecy,” he rattles off, smiling only when Wonwoo does. His ermine familiar- a guardian and animal companion, of sorts- squeaks something into his ear, to which Jihoon tuts and shushes.

 

It’s exactly the answer Wonwoo wanted to hear. “Don’t be so pessimistic,” he says, “I have a new machine, I’ve been developing the prototype for test runs for a few months now. If it works, it’ll point us in the right direction, and we’ll finally understand the prophecy.”

 

Jihoon notices how he doesn’t try to correct him on the first two impossible things he’d listed, which only makes his smile a little sharper. This is why he and Wonwoo could last all these years, through thick and thin and whatever follies were sandwiched between.

 

“Is it that machine you’ve kept hidden in the corner?”

 

“The one with the tarp on it. It’s a work in progress.” Wonwoo steeples his fingers. Its sheer size, shiny bronze and gold, is about three Jihoons tall, and the lever used to activate it will probably need all four of their arms, and then some added elbow grease, to crank into fruition.

 

“And how exactly is a _machine_ supposed to help us solve a riddle?” Jihoon stretches, using his legs to push his chair away from the table, arms raised high above his head as he stands up. “Enlighten me.”

 

Wonwoo’s eyes light up, as they always do when Jihoon prompts him to talk about any of his inventions. “You know how we think the prophecy is mentioning a chosen one? The prince?”

 

" _Uh-huh_.”

 

“This machine,” Wonwoo’s voice rises, and he adds dramatic pauses between every few words just to heighten the excitement, even though Jihoon’s eyes are still half-lidded and he’s stifling a yawn, “is programmed to locate the chosen one and lead us to him!”

 

Jihoon shakes his head. “It’s going to be a disaster. This is worse than every other unthinkable invention you’ve made in the past. All of which self-detonated, imploded, or almost killed us,” he says, rummaging through his lapel pocket for a cigar. He puts his ermine on his shoulder, where it curls into the crook of his neck and falls asleep. Wonwoo strikes a match and lights his cigar for him, silent. “By all means, though, good luck with the trial run.”

 

 

One year prior- before they moved into their own little loft, back when Jihoon was still a prodigious research professor and Wonwoo was still a scientist, and they lived together on their university’s campus- Jihoon had been perusing the library for a very particular book Wonwoo had wanted him to read the summer before. It was usually like that; Jihoon had so much on his plate (and on his mind) that it took him twenty minutes to backpedal and acknowledge what someone told him, and months to complete enough of his workload (both self-imposed and university-backed) to look into recommendations and leisurely reading.

 

(Wonwoo’s grown used to Jihoon being glassy-eyed and unfocused when he finally has him to himself in their room late at night, because his mind is spinning with an entire day’s conversations and passages and essays, so much tooth-and-claw and back-and-forth. Jihoon overexerts himself, but he says he likes having the wires in his mind running hot and thin, stretched between so many subjects, so there’s nothing Wonwoo can do, except offer him hot tea or rub his shoulders until he sighs and his muscles loosen.

 

It isn’t like Wonwoo’s madness is all that different. He builds a new machine before noon on a good day, and conducts an experiment before nightfall on most. He can’t finish a sentence without interrupting himself, he can’t conclude a conversation without running off to jot something down in his notebook, and he spends most of his free time nursing cuts and second-degree burns. They’re both mad enough to kill themselves for what they love, but that’s why they click so seamlessly. _Like two cogs with grooves and notches that fit perfectly together, a key in a lock, rotating and propelling off of one another,_ Wonwoo would say.)

 

A leather-bound book, ill-fit on the shelf, among sleek volumes, caught his eye before he could find the one he was here for. So he reached up, digging his fingers into the notch above the spine and pulling it out, watching all the other books creak and fall sideways into the empty space it left.

 

There was an ear of particularly weathered, browned paper sticking out of its middle, perhaps shoved in there as a bookmark, perhaps left for someone else to find and read. Jihoon opened it on page and found a poem written in black ink.

 

_Ice will crawl from the depths of the earth,_

  
_Four will gather where lights kiss the hearth._

  
_Skies cry blood, when the stars scatter,_

  
_Oceans run dry, when the moons shatter._

 

_Rise, with white hide on his back,_

  
_With him the underworld will crack._

  
_With him cursed blood will rule,_

  
_Until true prince brings spell and jewel._

 

_Only then will two worlds meet,_

  
_Only then will gods’ wrath cease… and repeat._

 

“I found a prophecy hidden in a library book earlier,” Jihoon announced through a bite of food, pushing Wonwoo’s elbows off the dinner table. Jihoon has known Wonwoo longer than he’s known anyone, and they were brought up among aristocrats, conditioned to sit straight and eat with the same manners and consciousness at both a dinner banquet full of scholars and an empty breakfast table. Wonwoo tries to shake off the stiffness of it all, often deliberately chewing with his mouth open (Jihoon tells him that’s not really rebellion, it’s just disgusting), and Jihoon always gets a kick out of correcting him even if, deep down, he doesn’t care either.

 

“Oh? Knowing you, it’s in your pocket right now. You can’t have left something like that in the library to fester,” Wonwoo had replied, breaking into a triumphant grin when Jihoon pulled the now-folded piece of paper out of his lapel pocket and slid it across the oak tabletop.

 

He read it, and reread it, and then Jihoon snatched it back and read it another time, and then they both read it aloud, Wonwoo’s head hooked onto Jihoon’s shoulder, both their eyes moving from line to line at the same speed.

 

“I don’t get it,” Wonwoo had finally said, sighing and digging his chin deeper into Jihoon’s shoulder-tips.

 

“Neither do I, but my best guess is it’s supposed to be some kind of prophecy.”

 

“Sure it’s not some kind of practical joke one of the other professors is playing? Or maybe the librarian stuffed his favourite poem into some book…”

 

“It’s one of a kind, though, isn’t it?” Jihoon had shrugged, lips curled in a way that, in all of Wonwoo’s time knowing Jihoon, only signified two things: distaste or deep thought. “Could be.” Short, clipped answers were also telltale signs of both.

 

They returned to their dinner in silence after that, both of them mulling over the concept of a prophecy falling into their hands.

 

 

Wonwoo pulls his oil-stained sleeve down over his hand, using the fabric to polish a dull spot on the machine, leaving it alone only when it glints eye-blindingly golden in the afternoon sunlight shafting through the small ceiling window. Then he sits back, biting his tongue between his teeth, admiring the machine he spent months salvaging parts for and welding together.

 

Opening the motherboard cover and flipping every switch up, he frantically whispers memorized instructions to himself. Then he watches bolts of controlled silver electricity crackle and fizz atop the machine, and between them, a flickering, blank hologram comes into focus. A steady puff of steam billows out of the exhaust pipe, and the smell of warming oil fills the room.

 

He clears his throat and reads the prophecy aloud. With every word that leaves his mouth, the hologram grows clearer and the electricity sparks yellower. “Show me the prince,” Wonwoo finally commands, hardly remembering to breathe as he does.

 

What he sees is a landscape, harsh and unforgiving. Flurries of ice fall from the sky, black cliffs and mountaintops just barely jutting above the whiteness that blankets everything, and when Wonwoo leans in close, he can hear the wind whistling through their crags and crevasses. If he closes his eyes and lets the sound surround him, he can almost feel his nose tip going numb from the cold.

 

And then the screen flickers and shows him a glacier, blue-green and jagged, sitting on the edge of a frozen bay. Upon closer look, a steep staircase is etched into the ice, winding up to a pair of locked double-doors.

 

The wind crackles and whips, billowing against the doors so they shake under its force. Eventually, they creak and yield, falling open and clattering as they do. Inside, it looks more like a palace than a glacier- the walls are still made of chipped, warped ice, but the ground is lined with furs, the ceiling lined with suns, moons, and stars. The room tapers into the farthest end, and when Wonwoo squints, he sees that a tall throne sits elevated on a pedestal of… bones? Black, charred bones, cracked bones, bones still seeping with blood and marrow. Piled, stacked, braided, haphazardly thrown, to form the foundation of this prince’s throne.

 

The back of the throne bears two icicles that extend toward the ceiling, and they frame the face of the boy nestled lazily between them. Or, he was, legs draped over the arms of the chair, gazing at his enchanted ceiling and running his fingers along the grooves in his diadem. Upon closer inspection, his diadem seems to be missing its centerpiece jewel, which is odd, but Wonwoo isn’t given the luxury of harping on it, because now the prince has noticed the disturbance. He sits upright, white-knuckled and livid as he tries to understand what force was strong enough to break through his palace doors.

 

The doors and the palace are protected, laced and woven and soaked in various enchantments, some taking months to cast and seal. The prince built the place so it could protect him from intruders and enemies, regardless of whether they’re gods or simple bandits, hiding all traces of his power and his blood. No one knows that the palace exists, in fact- he made sure his location was wiped from every map, and even the best compasses go haywire trying to pinpoint his coordinates.

 

And now someone not only found him, even under layers of snow and spell, but they breached every security measure he’d implemented.

 

When he stands, a cloak of soft white fur spills and spreads out in a train behind him, and his entire form flickers. It’s almost ghostly how the edges of his body- the tips of his black boots, his fingertips, the crown of his head- melt into translucence. Wonwoo trips backwards when the prince finally locates him, and somehow, through the hologram, finds his eyes and bores into them.

 

When their eyes meet, the hologram and the electricity both burst forth in an explosion of blues and whites. Shards of glass, sparks, splinters of ice, and shrapnel fly out in a wide, haloing arc. Motion slows as the flames stretch and lick at everything they can reach, and thick plumes of abnormally black smoke fill the laboratory. He watches the metal begin to crack, and then he watches his machine fracture, falling apart in red-hot pieces, and then the impact of the explosion hits him.

 

Wonwoo is thrown against the farthest wall, and when he hits it, he hears rather than feels his body crumble, the searing pain only hitting him when he falls to the ground. He coughs once, but for all he inhales, it still fills him with the taste of smoke and oil. He sees nothing but white stars glittering on the backs of his eyelids.

 

 

When Wonwoo comes to, the smoke has cleared slightly, enough for him to draw a few rattling breaths that replenish what was knocked out of his lungs. He lifts himself so he’s sitting up against the wall, wincing and groaning, because even the palms of his hands are sore.

 

His eyes take a minute to focus. Once they do, he surveys the wreckage. His machine, his six-months-to-build prototype, is irreparably destroyed, but somehow, among the dying flames, bits of blue ice glitter, and suspended in mid-air, the hologram still glows. Wonwoo blinks hard, but it’s still there, which should be impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

 

He doesn’t realize that magic, especially magic as strong as this prince’s, can bend and break all rules and impossibilities. This prince, who stands flickering within the hologram, his eyes, equal parts livid and curious, following Wonwoo’s every move.

 

“Who are you? Who are you to find me in the farthest corner of the earth, where I’m hidden from even the gods themselves?”

 

“I’m Wonwoo,” he replies, beginning to laugh when the prince’s nostrils flare, but stopping when pain flares up in his bruised ribs. He can almost feel the dull purples and greens beginning to bloom under his skin. “Wait, why are you hiding from the gods?”

 

He dismisses Wonwoo’s question. “ _Who are you?_ ” He repeats, his voice rising up and down, crackling with barely-contained fury, his entire image shaking as the hologram ripples. Wonwoo’s wolf stands between him and the hologram, growling, hackles raised.

 

“I’m an inventor, not a god, if that’s what you mean.”

 

“How did you find me?”

 

“Are you the prince from the prophecy?” Wonwoo asks, struggling to rise up, struggling to make his way closer to him.

 

“The prophecy? You know of it?” His eyes widen, but that’s as far as he gets before Jihoon begins knocking on the metal door.

 

“How hurt are you this time?” Jihoon shouts, tinny and distant. In the time it takes Wonwoo to walk over and unlock the door, the prince and what remained of the hologram have folded up and disappeared.

 

“Just bruises, Jihoon.” Jihoon barrels past him, only to pause when he sees the charred, cooling remains of Wonwoo’s laboratory. The sight is nothing new, but this explosion was louder and messier than the others, which probably stems from magic having been involved.

 

“It didn’t work, did it?” Jihoon says it like he knows the answer, because if judging only by the appearance of the room, it definitely looks like a spectacular failure. “Six months of work undone in six minutes, huh?”

 

“I mean, I’d consider it a success,” Wonwoo says, cryptically, his words bearing two meanings. He wishes to keep the prince a secret until he can further communicate with him and confirm that he is, indeed, the one the prophecy calls for. On the other hand, it passes as sarcasm, which Wonwoo knows will solicit some kind of smile from Jihoon- even if it only blooms, as it does now, in spite of his underlying disappointment.

 

 

The image of the inventor is seared into the prince’s mind. How he flew, feather-light, when his anger blew through his laboratory. How serene he looked with his eyes closed, his body bowed and curled, and how that serenity was replaced with confusion, defiance, and curiosity, in that order, when he woke to find Soonyoung watching him.

 

He knows of the prophecy, and knowing this has changed Soonyoung’s perspective entirely. His anger has dissipated and made way for determination. He’s determined to fix his unflattering first impression, to convince this inventor to abandon his laboratory and come north, to help him fulfill his part in the prophecy. To help fit Soonyoung’s crown to his head, to defy the gods and his lineage, to assist him in building his kingdom. This inventor is but a stepping stone, a ladder to take Soonyoung higher. A pawn in a soon-to-be-king’s game.

 

 

“You ruined everything of mine. You have a terrible temper, you know,” Wonwoo says, leaning over his ruined work-table to greet Soonyoung, whose incorporeal, holographic form has just appeared in his laboratory, uninvited this time.

 

Soonyoung’s eyes glitter. It’s going to be much harder than he thought to convince Wonwoo to even throw him a second glance, to pry his eyes away from his poker and pliers, let alone travel to the arctic to help him. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have been meddling in palaces you have no business trespassing into.” And maybe Soonyoung should keep his temper in place if the whole point of his reappearance is to charm and entice Wonwoo.

 

“You’re just here to rile me up,” Wonwoo shrugs, unbothered. “Don’t you have some peasants to go execute? Some furry animal to skin?”

 

“No.” Soonyoung would tell him to watch his tongue, for he’s in the presence of a prince, but he’d be wasting his breath, because he can see how deep-rooted his stubbornness is. Instead he bites his own tongue and reshapes his words, the crease in his brow softening. “But I am the prince from the prophecy, and it’s in my best interest to ask you why you used your machine to look for me.”

 

“My friend and I found the prophecy a long time ago, and we’ve become very invested in understanding it. So I made that machine in hopes of stringing the prophecy together by finding the prince myself, before time runs out,” and then, under his breath, “since the world is ending any day now.”

 

“Oh, is it?” A smirk of utmost satisfaction dresses his lips, telling Wonwoo that he has both hands elbows-deep in all of this, and he knows far more than he lets on. Which only piques his curiosity, and strengthens his belief that Soonyoung is the one he and Jihoon have been searching for.

 

“Now it’s up to you to tell me what happens next,” Wonwoo concludes, rolling his sleeves up pointedly. He has better things to do than entertain a prince. It frustrates Soonyoung that he won’t look him in the eye for more than a passive glance, but all the same, he doesn’t know why he wants Wonwoo’s eyes on him so badly.

 

“You’re coming to the arctic is what happens next,” Soonyoung says, doing his best to make his voice crackle and boom, to sound as commanding and tyrannically regal as he can. Little does he know that, for all he puffs out his chest and juts his jaw, he still looks like a child playing in his father’s oversized crown and lopsided furs. However, a demon in a manicured palace may be out of place, but that makes it nonetheless terrifying. “We need to meet in person for this.”

 

“”This” as in…?”

 

Soonyoung likes holding his answers just above peoples’ reach. He relishes in the way he leaves this one hanging over Wonwoo’s head, and he hopes he takes his bait. “I’ll tell you when you’re here.”

 

Wonwoo isn’t gullible. He can see how fickle and dangerous Soonyoung is, but he can’t refuse. He can’t bring himself to even think of it; it’ll eat away at him if he does. Besides, he’s the prince, and even Jihoon would have a hard time rejecting this offer. Soonyoung is a key to the prophecy’s lock.

 

 

Jihoon’s study is Wonwoo’s second-favourite room in their house. The dark oak of his furniture is unscratched and glossy, the shelves are teeming with books, and relics and artifacts glow from every tabletop. The empty space between furniture is taken up by hand-carved marble busts of gods and devils alike, but the most impressive of all is the life-sized one currently sitting in the chair behind the desk, eyeing Wonwoo over glasses and a cup of tea.

 

“The world is ending and you want us to go up north on some prince’s demand, I mean, “invite”?”

 

Wonwoo taps his fingers on his knees. Jihoon hates it when he brings any of his machinery into his study, so as a result of respecting his rules, Wonwoo’s jittery hands itch for something to grip and play with. “He’s not some prince. He’s the prince from the prophecy, Jihoon!”

 

“I really doubt that,” Jihoon replies, flipping through one of his books, but Wonwoo can tell he isn’t actually reading. He’s just trying to avoid succumbing to Wonwoo’s pleading, which has been a dark cloud following him with its endless downpour since yesterday night. Wonwoo can’t help half-smiling, self-assured, because this means Jihoon is cracking under his pressure.

 

“That’s not fair. You haven’t even seen him.”

 

“No, but one look at your room after he had his tantrum tells me he’s not the one destined to put the world back together,” Jihoon laughs, but he’s not amused. “I wouldn’t doubt it if you told me he was one destroying it, actually.”

 

“So you won’t come with me?”

 

Jihoon eyes him warily, and Wonwoo can tell the tip of his tongue is teeming with questions about Wonwoo’s eagerness and insistence and newfound loyalty to a stranger who claims to be a prince. But he keeps quiet, as he always does, and his answer is nothing but a question that directly corresponds to Wonwoo’s. “You’re going to disregard my feelings about this, as always?”

 

He shifts in his sunken ottoman, shrugging uncomfortably. “I-”

 

“You’re really willing to trust this “prince”? Have you considered how dangerous going to his palace, in the middle of snowy nowhere, on a presently shattering planet, is?”

 

“I am, and I have, and I think it’ll be- it’ll be safe enough.” Wonwoo expects the waver in his voice to be scrutinized, but Jihoon just sighs, which is almost worse.

 

“I trust you,” Jihoon says, and though his wariness betrays that sentiment, Wonwoo still knows he’s being honest. Their relationship is founded on- if nothing else, if not on sleepless nights and taking their tea and coffee the same way- trust. In each other’s judgment most of all. “And if you trust him, then so do I.”

 

“What you’re saying is-”

 

“I wasn’t finished yet,” he interrupts, and Wonwoo goes quiet. Jihoon smiles dryly. “I do still think there’s something fishy about all of this, but I’m not about to let you get yourself killed- and not experiment-killed, I mean pallor-mortis- _killed_ \- without being there to see it happen.”

 

Wonwoo knows this to be Jihoon’s roundabout, offhand way of saying he wants to be there to protect him, but it’s not only that, because this is also his way of indirectly admitting interest. “Good, because I can’t go without you,” he admits, in turn. “I can do the maintenance, but I can’t fly the airship like you can.”

 

 

“You’re coming?”

 

Wonwoo doesn’t greet Soonyoung. He doesn’t even look up from the newspaper he’s sitting on his laboratory table to read. His face is hidden behind it, and he raises it even higher now that he knows he’s here and probably looking at him. As much as he itches to see Soonyoung again, he forces himself to stay like this, just to test how far Soonyoung’s patience extends. But he thinks his smile spills into his voice anyway. “Maybe.”

 

A cold breeze ghosts through the room- all of the windows are closed and locked- and hits Wonwoo’s back, making his collar as well as his hair rustle. Goosebumps erupt along his arms, and for a brief second, his bones feel frozen solid. He shivers in spite of himself. “Yes or no? Give me straight answers.” Soonyoung’s voice hangs, carrying with it the threat of more arctic wind.

 

“You’re so demanding,” Wonwoo grumbles, folding the newspaper painstakingly slowly. He crosses his legs and sets it on his lap. Soonyoung and his reappearance are much more intriguing than the article he was reading, but it doesn’t hurt him to feign disinterest. “We are. Happy now?” His little wolf familiar bares her teeth at Soonyoung from where she sits under the table. Simultaneously, Wonwoo sticks his tongue out at him, small and pink between his lips, and revels in the way Soonyoung’s eyes harden.

 

“Very,” Soonyoung replies, but for all the daggers in his eyes and the frostiness in his voice, he’s made no sign of leaving, even now that he’s extracted the information he came for.

 

“Wait,” Wonwoo steeples his fingers and entwines them, resting them on his knobby knees. Soonyoung watches Wonwoo’s movements, and Wonwoo watches his eyes as he does. “Would you have forced us to come if we hadn’t complied?”

 

“Probably. I’m not about to let you get away from me so easily,” he says, and his laugh rings light, but it makes the hairs on Wonwoo’s neck stand up. Soonyoung notices his discomfort, but his wide smile doesn’t waver. Only his eyes do. “Does the thought of me doing that unnerve you?”

 

Wonwoo shakes his head, holding Soonyoung’s stare. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”

 

He is unnerved, but only slightly. He feels like a fly caught in a spider’s web, or like he’s blindfolded and being led by hand off the edge of a cliff. He just might have wandered into a devil’s clutches, and a deal he doesn’t remember making just might have spawned, but in spite of these feelings, he hasn’t had a fleeting thought about backing out of this. There’s always been an allure to the prophecy, and now, by extension, there’s an allure to this prince and his arctic.

 

 

The inflated ballonet is full of steam- steam that’ll keep the airship buoyant for the entirety of their trip- but it being so full means that the airship’s ascent is painfully slow. It rises inch by inch from where it’s been sitting in Jihoon and Wonwoo’s backyard, disused since Jihoon’s return from his first polar exploration. They spent time polishing it up, cleaning the passengers’ gondola and filling it with food and supplies, making little beds for Jihoon’s ermine and Wonwoo’s wolf. Wonwoo even disconnected the engine and propellers for multiple, scrupulous check-ups. Everything is in order, and now Wonwoo hangs out of one of the open windows, looking down at the patch of flattened, wilted weeds cast under the airship’s bobbing shadow.

 

He sucks cool air into his lungs as they rise higher still, relishing in the feeling of the floor beneath him swaying, shifting with the wind. Jihoon, meanwhile, clutches at the dashboard and looks out through the windshield, breath held and lips pursed as he watches their little, lopsided house grow farther and farther away. His eyes break away only when their house is such a pinprick on the horizon that it blends into the other buildings surrounding it.

 

As he begins to steer the airship due north, Jihoon adjusts his oversized bronze goggles so they sit more comfortably on his nose. The sound of the propellers cutting through the wind and the dull rumble of the engine merge together to send a thrum through the gondola. The windows, doors, and floorboards tremble gently. To Wonwoo, the sound is comforting, for it means his machine is alive and well.

 

Their airship eventually breaks free of the dense layer of smog that blankets the city, and when they leave it below them, they coast in and out of shreds of clear white cloud. They can see the sun dipping down to kiss a distant blue ocean, and the horizon and how it stretches wide, curving out of sight.

 

“We’re so far removed up here, I can almost see our planet spinning,” Wonwoo remarks. He can’t, not really, but it doesn’t hurt to imagine that the horizon is rotating before his eyes as he hangs above it.

 

“Yes, Wonwoo, and a meteor is going to knock us off course and strand us on Mars,” Jihoon is dismissive, not looking up from the bronze levers he’s busy switching on. The control board lights up, illuminating his nimble fingers as they glide over the smorgasbord of compasses and meters, buttons and levers. Wonwoo can’t remember what half of them do, and he needs a manual propped open at arm’s reach when he’s the one piloting, but Jihoon knows it all like he knows the back of his hand.

 

“Oh, lighten up!” Wonwoo pries his hands from the control boards (at which Jihoon protests and tries to twist away), bringing him to the open window. He puts his arm over Jihoon’s shoulder and, despite Jihoon trying to shrug him off, squeezes it, enveloping him in a half-hug. “Can you feel the fresh air?”

 

Jihoon nods wordlessly. It looks like a painting, the canvas green and rolling endlessly before their eyes, tiny trees glowing golden in the setting sunlight. The wind picks up, crisp and smoky. “Can you feel a tingle in your bones, or is it just me?”

 

“Just you,” Jihoon replies, but he smiles and turns to reach up and scruff Wonwoo’s hair. “No, I feel it.” It’s electric. It’s the excitement of starting a journey, of being in the clouds, of what lies ahead, and what awaits them at their eventual destination.

 

 

Junhui has been stranded for weeks now. The fields never end, stretching as far as his eye can see, and rocky chasms bloom in the dips between them. The sky never lightens, and rain never falls. Dark figures shimmer like mirages ahead of him, but disappear before he can come close enough to ask for directions or a ride north. Sometimes, it feels like he’s looping in the same wide circle, a cycle that never ends. But the trouble is, he doesn’t remember where he began.

 

 

The hills they’ve reached are bleak and bare, moorland scattered with heather and asphodel, snowcapped cliffs falling away to the pebble beaches below. This is the northernmost tip of their land, and beyond it, dark clouds hover over black water- that’s the ocean they’ll be crossing to reach Soonyoung’s north.

 

Jihoon proposes they spend the night here on the cliffs, and Wonwoo knows it’s because it’ll ease his mind if they rest the engine and do an unnecessary (but nonetheless comforting) maintenance checkup before leaving land behind. Wonwoo throws the bolted gondola door open, leaping out just as the airship touches the field. Bits of cotton-grass, white and ticklish, swirl around them as the propellers wind down to a stop.

 

Wonwoo plucks a nameless yellow wildflower from the soft bog and twists the stem between his fingers. His wolf weaves between his legs, restless as he is after being cooped up for days. “I’m going to scope this place out a bit, alright?”

 

“Don’t be long, I’ll need another pair of hands soon,” Jihoon responds over his shoulder, already removing the propeller-guards and engine cover.

 

Wonwoo doesn’t have to go far to see all there is to this place. In fact, he’s still within Jihoon’s sight, standing close to the edge overlooking the beach and the water. Bits of sand and rock shower down as he leans farther out, but he hardly notices how unstable the ground is beneath him. Because along the hills across from the one they landed on, and dotting the beach below, strange figures are drifting and milling about.

 

They seem human, but upon closer look (the soil is soft and beginning to crumble under his feet), their flesh is either black, decomposing, or eaten away entirely. On some, he sees skull and vertebrae and jutting white bone. Others look more like simple grey ghosts. Seeing the undead roaming the earth like this, albeit harmlessly, makes his mouth go dry. They should be buried beneath his feet.

 

The ground gives and Wonwoo yelps. As he loses his footing, a hand catches his arm and pulls him back onto the cliff edge, and without looking up, Wonwoo knows it isn’t Jihoon. He briefly considers the idea of owing his life to one of the wraiths before he turns to face his savior.

 

His savior is a man whose flesh is thankfully uneaten- he’s rather whole and golden, in fact. He blends into the moorland behind him, not grimy or wild at all, but not spruce and polished as Wonwoo is. Wonwoo would call him out-of-place, but then he realizes that he’s the one who is, standing in the middle of nowhere in his crisp blue peacoat, collar turned up, boots glossy and monocle glinting. “Thank you,” he breathes out instead.

 

“It was nothing.” Closer now, he smells fresh and gentle. Like dew and moss and sprigs of herb.

 

“Are you from around here?”

 

“I’m trying to figure out how to cross an ocean without having to swim the whole way,” he tells him absently, eyes glassy as he stares at the ocean over Wonwoo’s shoulder. Before Wonwoo even has a chance to be bewildered, he blinks and smiles at him. “I’m not from around here, but I am Junhui.”

 

“Wonwoo,” he responds, wondering if he should extend a hand or not. “Are you a northerner, then?”

 

“Boreal, yes, sure, but mostly in need of a boat,” Junhui answers, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. Only now does Wonwoo notice the belts cinched around his narrow waist, off of which wild rabbit pelts, looped climbing rope, and a little jewelry pouch dangle.

 

“Where are you heading?”

 

“Wherever you’re going, if you can take me. I can always find my way once I’m up there,” Junhui nods at the ocean again, and picks up the teeming canvas bag that sits at his feet in the grass, which Wonwoo also neglected to notice. “I didn’t peg you as the sailor type, though.”

 

Junhui doesn’t seem to have seen the airship, despite it being perched on the crest of the hill, huge and golden and in plain sight. Wonwoo snorts and points it out to him. “That’s because I’m not. I have an airship.”

 

 

“Wonwoo, did you see the-” Jihoon stops in his tracks, his cigar dropping ashes on the floor. It’s not Wonwoo standing in front of him. It’s a man he’s never seen before, tall and spindly, lips as crooked as his legs and fingers, followed closely by a little red fox. “What are you doing in here?”

 

“Your friend Wonwoo said you had room for me,” he replies, his words accented and gently pronounced. He’s foreign and strange, and he’s rubbing his neck nervously now, and Jihoon thinks they’re both just as startled by each other. He notices that he has to duck his head to keep from hitting it against one of the metal pipes running along the ceiling, and that his left ear is full of golden piercings that jingle when he moves and glint when they catch the light.

 

“Well, my friend Wonwoo doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Jihoon begins, but then Wonwoo stumbles his way through the heather and into the gondola, shutting the door and bolting it behind him. The words die in Jihoon’s mouth, and he raises his eyebrows instead, waiting for a long overdue explanation.

 

“Jihoon, we need to get going. I don’t like this place. The sooner we get over the water, the better.”

 

“We aren’t moving an inch until you explain this.” Jihoon tilts his head in Junhui’s direction.

 

“He’s a northerner,” Wonwoo says.

 

“A traveler,” Junhui interrupts.

 

Wonwoo’s forehead wrinkles, and he readjusts his monocle, looking between Jihoon, whose expression is darkening with every word that’s being said, and Junhui, whose eyes have been gleaming ever since he set them on Jihoon. The gleam wasn’t there when he was looking at Wonwoo earlier, nor did he rake his eyes up and down his body this curiously. “You told me you were-”

 

“A ranger,” Junhui cuts through his words, changing his title for the third time, “if you want to be technical.”

 

“He’s going north, and we have room to spare, don’t we?” Wonwoo concludes, his smile wilting under the withering look Jihoon gives him. He can almost predict Jihoon’s actions, so when he takes Wonwoo by the wrist and towards the corner of the gondola farthest from Junhui, Wonwoo isn’t surprised. But he can’t tell if Junhui is tactful enough to pretend to be looking out the window, or if he’s just blissfully unaware of their whispering about him.

 

“He can help us find our way,” Wonwoo tries.

 

“We weren’t lost or in need of assistance,” Jihoon steamrolls.

 

“Did you see those wraiths milling around? I felt bad leaving him, Jihoon.”

 

Jihoon has something on the tip of his tongue, but he’s interrupted when Junhui’s fox begins to chase his ermine around the middle of the room, yapping and squeaking and baring his teeth. “Save it, Wonwoo. He’s your responsibility and I want nothing to do with him, and that’s that.” A muscle trembles in his clenched jaw when he bends down to scoop his ermine up with one hand, dismissing Wonwoo with the other.

 

 

Ahead of them, clouds swirl, and save for the occasional fork of lightning bathing the gondola and the ocean in blinding yellow light, Wonwoo can hardly discern where the ocean ends from where the clouds begin. They’ve been in the airship for many days, but this is the first sunset they can’t see even a sliver of. All they see is the sky darkening, the colour fading too fast, any and all warmth sucked out of the evening air so that frost begins to build on the glass windows.

 

Junhui hovers somewhere in Wonwoo’s periphery, milling around the room with only a little more purpose than the wraiths had back on the moors. He cracks his knuckles and watches the storm as it swallows swathes of ocean, a monster waiting to consume their airship. “Do you see the shapes in the clouds?” He asks, directly into Wonwoo’s ear, his voice soft, airy, almost chilling. Wonwoo doesn’t know if that effect was desired or entirely unintentional, and he’s realizing that he can’t seem to tell with Junhui. His motives aren’t clear, and whether that itself is by choice or by accident only adds to his confusion.

 

Wonwoo squints through the darkness, the fog, and the gentle drizzle that has now begun to clatter against the metal walls of the room. At first, he sees nothing, and he’s beginning to think Junhui derives pleasure from unsettling him, but then he notices that the clouds writhe and gasp and whisper with a life of their own, moving not from the wind that whisks through them. He sees dapples, shadows, and imprints of faces within them. He sees black eyes watching the airship, beckoning them forward. He notices now that when the thunder rumbles, it sounds less like thunder, and more like a growl.

 

“The gods are angry.” Junhui speaks to the room at large, matter-of-fact and unbothered, as though the gods and their wrath are nothing but a conversation piece, a speck of lint to flick off his lapel.

 

“At us?” Jihoon cuts in, nervous fingers skimming the control board, looking for something to press or pull. “Should we try to circumvent the storm?”

 

“Oh, it’s too late for that.” Jihoon wouldn’t usually trust someone so scatterbrained, but Junhui’s eyes are so focused, his voice so sure when he says it. He stands huddled and quiet, folding his sleeve over his hand so he can wipe frost away from the window and look at the storm through the smudged glass.

 

“This is the worst decision you’ve ever made, Wonwoo,” Jihoon addresses him grimly, as he continues to steer the airship into the very eye of the storm. Fat raindrops begin to splatter against the windshield, and a gust blows so strong that the entire airship creaks. “And you’ve made plenty of terrible decisions in my lifetime of knowing you.”

 

Wonwoo doesn’t have it in him to mind both Jihoon blaming him for this and the heaviness he feels settling on his shoulders, making them sag under its weight. Although Jihoon had agreed to come with him, he’s the one who was (and still is) convinced that Soonyoung is the answer to the prophecy’s riddle, both its beginning and its close. This airship is operating solely on his whims and desires. He’d apologize, but it’s better left unsaid, especially when tendrils of cloud are creeping around them, hugging the airship so tightly that it seems more like a chokehold. Lightning strikes them and they careen off-course, plunging into pitch-blackness.

 

 

Soonyoung watches their airship, battered and breaking in the wind, from the comfort of his throne, knowing that he’s the reason why the gods are targeting them. Knowing, and feeling no obligation to help them. Some sympathy, for Wonwoo, but not for the other two. Amusement most of all, at how his voice, his name on Wonwoo’s tongue, was enough to send the gods into such a rage searching for him.

 

 

They glide through a patch of weak sunlight, a brief stretch free of turbulence and pounding rain, windows thrown open to dispel the stuffiness. There are clouds gathering on the horizon, but Jihoon thinks they’ll reach them by sunset and no sooner. That buys them time to devise a plan, to circumvent this coming storm.

 

He has maps and scrolls sprawled and spread across the table, and on them are colourful renditions of northern islands and their coordinates. He has his finger pinned over the spot reading their airship’s current location, his eyebrows furrowed, the room around him shut out. They’re stranded over open sea. Even the closest peninsula of Soonyoung’s north is too many miles away, especially considering how shredded their sails are.

 

A beam of light catches Jihoon’s eye, a new voice filtering into his ears, and only then does he abandon his table. A hologram is flickering into focus in the far corner of the room, and within it sits a boy. He looks young, but the way he squares his shoulders, carries his head high, pointed chin and sloping nose up, implies power. More power than he should probably be trusted with.

 

It doesn’t take Jihoon more than a second to gather, from his velvet-lined diadem- missing its centerpiece jewel- to his snow-white skin, that he’s Soonyoung, their prince as well as their destination. And it doesn’t take him another second to decide that something about him is inherently unsettling. He’s a sculpture carved out of marble and ice, with only the faintest sense of flesh and blood, the dullest pulse coursing through him, just barely keeping his lips pink.

 

“Who is this?” He asks, eyes harsh as he peers at Jihoon. He treats him like a subject, looking at him as if he was a doll in a display case.

 

“He’s my-”

 

“Best friend,” Jihoon finishes, putting his hand on Wonwoo’s shoulder and squeezing it. Warmth floods through Wonwoo, from the tips of his ears down to his toes.

 

“Do you know who I am?” Soonyoung looks even more put-out than he usually does, like Jihoon and Wonwoo rained, no, snowed on his parade. It agitates Jihoon, the way he addresses him out of the corner of his mouth, keeping his eyes firmly trained to Wonwoo’s face.

 

“Unfortunately and regrettably, I do, Soonyoung.”

 

Wonwoo chuckles, but it dies in his throat when he sees just how dark Soonyoung’s eyes swirl, lips hardening into a white line. Where Wonwoo has his heart on his sleeve, Soonyoung has his tucked so far down, hidden under so many layers of fur and spell, so many seasons of snow piled high, that no one can see his true incentives and emotions. He and Junhui are alike in their ambiguity, but that’s where their likeness ends.

 

He tilts his head to one side, observing Jihoon properly for the first time. “I don’t take kindly to being addressed so plainly.”

 

“And I don’t take kindly to being talked down to.”

 

“Do you take kindly to being a frozen fixture in my palace courtyard, then?” As he speaks, crystallized ice begins to glisten along his glossy black hair, spreading patterns down to his ears and jaw.

 

“Don’t threaten me.” Jihoon steps in front of Wonwoo, who tries to push him away, to dispel the tension between them, but he doesn’t get far before the gondola shakes and lurches, distracting them all. The windows slam shut, the compasses and the control boards going haywire.

 

Underneath them, the water is swirling in eddies and sinking through cracks in the sand, as though the ocean was an oversized bathtub and its drain-stopper had been pulled away. It leaves the sand dry, and it leaves red seaweed reefs to shrivel in the sunlight, whales beached, fish floundering out of water. Then the ground quivers, and the water comes surging back, flooding and roaring with too much force, sending everything adrift. If they’d been sailing, their boat would’ve capsized, no matter its size.

 

It’s not Soonyoung’s doing, because even he looks surprised when a wave rises so high it curls and slams into the airship, saltwater streaming down the doors and spraying the windows. The ocean licks and laps at the belly of the airship, waves stretching unnaturally as they try to drag them down under. And it’s working, because they’re beginning to drop in altitude.

 

Junhui, who had blended into the shadows in the back of the room until now, points at the storm gathering overhead. The sky is still clear in the distance, but their airship is caught and caged in heavy, unmoving clouds.

 

“It’s sad to see our first conversation draw to a close so soon. Too soon,” Soonyoung says as the hologram fades and flashes back into focus, his words disjointed but still ringing clipped and clear. Wonwoo stumbles when the floorboards twist beneath his feet. “But this isn’t the last of me you’ll be seeing, if that’s any compensation.”

 

Then he fades away, leaving behind him a sense of cold, twisting helplessness that floods through the darkening gondola. His presence leaves the scent of death hanging in the air, musky and sweet and earthy, hollow at its core.

 

 

“It wasn’t Soonyoung,” comes Wonwoo’s voice, three days late, just as the airship makes a creaky landing in the middle of a barren field. They’ve reached the very tip of Soonyoung’s north, and the whole airship sighs in relief when it touches the ground, metal, pipes, and people within it alike. The stability and permanence of land isn’t something Jihoon thought he’d miss so dearly.

 

Junhui is bending down to help Jihoon recover the papers that were scattered around the room over the course of the storm, and he hits his head on the underside of the table when Wonwoo speaks. “But it was his presence that caused it,” he mutters as he rises up to press the papers into Jihoon’s hands, rubbing the top of his head.

 

The gondola is a disaster, and Jihoon wishes Junhui would stop trying to help him reorganize it. He wishes he would stop being so helpful, wishes he would just stay out of his way and stick to the sidelines where he belongs.

 

His lips quirk up, and although he’d decided not to give Junhui more than a passing glance, to speak to him only when necessary, the sureness in his voice piques his interest once again. “How do you know that?”

 

“I- well, I’m not sure, but there’s something about him that just isn’t right.” Junhui folds in on himself, clamming up under both Wonwoo and Jihoon’s eyes as they shift over to him. Jihoon thinks it’s strange, since he’s probably commanded plenty of attention in his lifetime, if only judging by how much of a sore thumb he is in a crowd. It’s surprising that he’s such a stranger to scrutiny. “I think something about him angers the gods, and since they sense a trace of him on Wonwoo...”

 

“…that’s why they’re targeting our airship?” Jihoon picks up the rest of his sentence and completes it, watching Junhui trail off and stare idly into space, deep in his own thoughts. Having to chew and spit out the rest of other people’s words for them irritates him, but having common grounds with Junhui somehow makes that easier to overcome. “Either way, he ruffles my feathers, too,” he says, nodding begrudgingly.

 

Those last words feel strange on his tongue, jogging his memory but taking it nowhere. Then he realizes that he’s holding a very comfortable conversation with Junhui, and that it must be what coloured and soured everything.

 

Wonwoo opens the gondola door, and his wolf slips through the gap before he opens it fully, betraying his emotions, as familiars usually do. He has his camera in one hand, and its tripod and the box of film in the other. He has one foot out the door and the other propping it open when Jihoon tries to stop him. “You can’t frolic and take pictures yet. I need you to help me fix the rips in the ballonet first.”

 

Wonwoo looks between him and Junhui, smiling imperceptibly. “Can’t he help you?”

 

 

“You think he’s running off to talk to that prince again?” Junhui asks, his voice drowned out by the sounds of Jihoon re-welding bits of dented, broken metal onto the outside of the airship. Jihoon is perched on the roof of the gondola, teetering and swaying when the seaside breeze billows over his bird-boned body, clothes rippling in such a way that it looks like he just might float away. Junhui’s arms are piled with things Jihoon has instructed him to hold, to hand over when needed, but he wishes they were free, just so he could hold them out to catch him if he was to fall.

 

Junhui begins to wonder if his words were spread out and stranded, between the wind and the sound of the metal scraping, before Jihoon shakes his head. “No,” he replies, readjusting his bronze goggles. “He’s an idiot, and I wouldn’t put it past him to try to contact Soonyoung again, but I doubt it this time.”

 

“He’s really just taking pictures of the tundra, then?”

 

“Who wouldn’t want to?” Junhui wouldn’t have caught the sarcasm in his voice even if he didn’t have the wind to blame for drowning it out. Jihoon stops working for a minute, sighing and sitting on his knees on the cold metal, looking onwards at the grey ocean and the brown, wind-mussed hills, peppered with hedges and reeds and little, murky ponds. Junhui’s hair is about as mussed and ruffled as the bushes are, and he blends into this scenery far too well. Jihoon supposes it’s because this, north, is his homeland.

 

Jihoon doesn’t think he and Wonwoo ever blended into their city quite this well, though. They always stuck out, like white birds among ravens, preened feathers glowing in the dark. The city isn’t their home, Jihoon knows that for certain, but he doesn’t know what is, and whether they’ll ever find it.

 

Where they’re both perched, on the edge of one of the propellers, Junhui’s fox edges closer to Jihoon’s ermine. Its auburn fur ruffles the same way Junhui’s hair does, and its eyes and lips, curved and wide and sly (as Junhui’s are), are glittering when they watch his ermine.

 

“Torque wrench,” Jihoon breaks through his reverie, stretching his pale palm out. Junhui hands him the wrench, but not before fumbling with the toolbox and dropping most of its contents so they clang and further dent the metal. He apologizes, but Jihoon dismisses him swiftly.

 

“If you don’t mind me asking, how did you even come into contact with this prince?”

 

“Call him Soonyoung.”

 

“Alright, captain.”

 

“Don’t call me captain,” Jihoon says, lip curling in distaste as he twists a loose bolt into place.

 

Junhui breaks into a smile brighter than a thousand midday suns, and he raises his hand to his temple, saluting Jihoon, which in turn only serves to make Jihoon’s grimace spread wider.

 

“Well, it started with this thing- I guess you could call it a prophecy- that I found a long time ago,” Jihoon begins, not expecting Junhui to drop the wrench he’d just given him and gasp in pain when it hits his foot. He doesn’t ask him if he’s alright, but he looks from his weathered boots to his face and raises his eyebrows.

 

“I’m fine. You mentioning a prophecy surprised me, is all. Do you have it memorized?”

 

Jihoon has the original piece of paper tucked into his lapel pocket, in fact, and he does have it memorized, after nights of pulling it out and reading it by dim, flickering candlelight, elbow propped up against his pillow, trying desperately to decipher it. “Why? Do you know anything about it?”

 

“I might.”

 

Jihoon rolls his eyes and asks for the arc welder. He warns Junhui to cover his eyes, lest any stray sparks blind him. Junhui thinks Jihoon is going to ignore him and drop the subject, but then he begins reciting the prophecy over the sound of metal grating. “ _Ice will crawl from the depths of the earth_ -”

 

 _“Four will gather where the lights kiss the hearth!”_ Junhui completes enthusiastically. “Oh, I know that one by heart.”

 

Jihoon stops, and orange sparks, yellow bursts, white flecks rain down and around him, landing on his shoulders and in his hair. They fall like starbursts, like he had a light-bulb moment that kindled so bright it exploded in a shower. If Junhui had covered his eyes, he wouldn’t have seen this, because it happens in the split-second it takes Jihoon to turn to him. “Have you been going through my things while I’m asleep?”

 

Junhui steps back, and his fox returns to him, wrapping its bushy tail around his leg. “What? Why would I do that?”

 

“Because,” Jihoon pulls the paper out of his pocket and holds it at arm’s length for Junhui to pluck, unfold, and read. When Junhui meets his eyes after reading it, he says, “Wonwoo and I are- were- the only people who knew of it. You’re just some hitchhiker, and I know nothing about you or your motives, and you of all people are the last person I expected to have it memorized.”

 

“It’s northern in origin, as am I. My mother used to read it to me before bed every night, and she asked me to remember it after she left me,” Junhui answers, voice soft as he defends himself. “What’s so strange about that, Jihoon?”

 

Jihoon digs his heels into the metal, shaking his head. “Maybe I was quick to judge you. I apologize. But do you know anything else about this prophecy? It’s important.”

 

“I know it like you’d know a folk song, or a nursery rhyme,” Junhui answers, rubbing the back of his neck and stepping farther back when Jihoon meets his eyes for the first time. The intensity in his gaze is startling.

 

“So nothing. Alright, Junhui,” he says, scooping the supplies out of his arms and setting them on the gondola’s roof. Jihoon’s ermine clings to his shoulder, half-hidden. “We’re done for now.”

 

“You mean it seriously?” Junhui asks. He’s startled by how Jihoon’s mood fluctuates in much the same way the wind changes directions.

 

“Uh-huh. I don’t need your help anymore. Take a hike. Get lost.”

 

“Close your eyes and I’m gone,” Junhui tells him, leaning too close, staring at Jihoon steadily, unblinking, making him shrink away like no one else has (and if Wonwoo was here, he could attest to that). “Really, do it.”

 

Jihoon sighs, eyelids fluttering shut. He counts under his breath, and listens for footsteps, but he hears none.

 

When he opens them, Junhui is gone, and all that remains of him is a shower of yellow sparks, raining down on the place where he stood mere seconds before.

 

 

“What exactly did you tell him?”

 

“I told him to get lost, but I didn’t know he was going to take my words literally.”

 

“Jihoon! Which direction did he go?”

 

“I don’t really care. We got him across the ocean, which means we can leave without him now.” To Jihoon, Junhui is excess baggage, and he can’t explain why, but his presence makes everything more complicated than it needs to be. Dropping him means lightening the load and easing the journey, if only slightly. Wonwoo follows him into the gondola and towards the dashboard, watching him begin activating the airship for take-off.

 

“We can’t, because I’ll feel bad abandoning him, and you will, too…” he catches Jihoon’s expression, and under his breath he mutters, “eventually.”

 

“Fine, I’ll give him ten minutes to show up,” Jihoon crosses his arms. “This place’ll be in our dust by eleven, though.”

 

To Jihoon’s genuine surprise, Junhui arrives on the very last minute, the airship beginning to rise as he clambers through the door, grasping onto Wonwoo’s hands. Once inside, he brushes bits of moss off of his leopard-skin cloak and faces them with his usual lopsided grace, unfazed.

 

“How did you arrive right on time like that?” Jihoon sputters out.

 

“Sense of direction, I guess?” He picks a bronze compass up off the table and twists it in his fingers. “I found you when I needed you. Just like I did the first time.”

 

 

“It’s self-sustaining. It shouldn’t need a water stop this soon, or ever, really.”

 

“Well, buddy, I’ve got news for you.” Jihoon brings Wonwoo closer and taps at the glass encasing the dashboard, under which the engine light and the water measure both flash bright red.

 

Wonwoo crosses his arms and turns his back to the dashboard and the windshields, his messy hair and upturned coat collar outlined against the blue horizon. “Engine maintenance? We just did that.”

 

“It also says the water tank is low.”

 

“Who cares what it says?”

 

“You built it, Wonwoo! I trust its accuracy because of you being the one behind its engineering. Why did you even put a water measure if we aren’t supposed to read it, anyway?”

 

“Jihoon,” Wonwoo speaks carefully. “The steam in the ballonet is reusable, it’s constantly regenerating in the boilers down below. And if we really are running low on water, then it’s simple, because the boilers will stop feeding the engine steam.”

 

Jihoon looks worried. “And then what? We just fall out of the sky?”

 

“No, then the engine switches over to electricity. It’ll need some initial charge from a power source to get it going, but beyond that point, the currents keep reverberating back and forth so strongly that they run on their own energy.”

 

“That’s incredible,” Junhui whispers, and Wonwoo doesn’t know if he’s impressed by the mechanics of the airship or the way he summarized it.

 

The airship slopes downwards, lowering gently at first, then beginning to swoop and gain speed in its descent. The ravine they’re dipping into is flanked by the distant beginnings of a snowy mountain range, all harsh cliffs and steep ice. Beyond that mountain range, above and across it, only those who wish to enter Soonyoung’s north, a frozen wasteland sparsely populated and teeming with heavy magic, traverse.

 

Wonwoo looks onwards, idyllic and sure that they’ll at least float over and beyond the peaks before they have to land. He has his hand hanging out the window, fingers pink and numb and twitching in the fog, as though trying to catch shreds of it.

 

Jihoon looks downwards, at the glade of sharp, snow-capped trees that the bottom of the airship is skimming over, branches breaking under the gondola. They’re dropping in altitude, and when he sees the second boiler’s dashboard light flashing red, he knows there’s nothing he can do. They’ve overheated, and soon they’ll overflow. He’s lost control of the ship, but still he continues to grip the wheel.

 

A gust of wind sends them too close to the slopes, and they scrape into the jagged cliffs before he can stop them. The metal bones of the gondola creak but don’t give.

 

Junhui speaks too soon. “At least we didn’t-”

 

He’s interrupted by a sickening pop, followed by a rush of whistling air from the now-punctured ballonet above.

 

If the airship hadn’t begun lurching and bouncing and dropping nose-down, the windshield glass cracking under a cascade of loosened rocks and soil, Jihoon might’ve laughed. He’s given no time to, because the tables and chairs and supplies are sliding across the gondola and towards them. Encyclopedias tip off of the shelves and fall, spines twisted, pages fluttering, cutlery and pillows and telescopes rolling across the floor.

 

Their familiars crowd against them. The airship is tilted such that they can no longer see the horizon through the windshield, only the tundra they’re about to careen into. Jihoon counts the seconds down. Five.

 

All paper planes eventually fall to the ground. Theirs floated for longer than most. Four.

 

“Wonwoo!” He calls, but Wonwoo’s already by his side. He hugs him without hesitation, arms too tight around his middle, and Wonwoo drags Junhui in by the arm. Three. Jihoon doesn’t even have the time to think before he lets Junhui wrap an arm around him. Two. They huddle, braced in a final embrace. One.

 

 

Something softens their fall, dulling the collision. They fly apart, but Jihoon’s eyes are open and he’s on his feet as soon as the airship stops in its tracks. He wastes no time, even if his body feels shaken, because he knows what untamed electrical charges and two overflowing boilers will become soon enough.

 

All the furniture is overturned, and the dashboard is smoking and beginning to crackle. The windows have caved in, carpeting the ground in shards of glass. Junhui stirs where he’d landed among the glass, glittering in the late afternoon light, and Jihoon helps him up. They’re both dazed, but panic claws at Jihoon’s throat and sobers him when he scans the room and finds it empty.

 

“Wonwoo? Wonwoo!” Jihoon begins kicking through their destroyed supplies, broken jars of food and papers beginning to catch fire, lifting overturned chairs and tables and searching beneath them.

 

There’s a throb that runs through the entire airship, and smoke begins pouring in through the cracks in the floors and walls. The pipes begin sputtering. Then Jihoon sees Wonwoo’s wolf, grey fur blending into the wreckage, and just beyond her, he sees the blue of Wonwoo’s coat.

 

He finds him withered, one of his legs buried under a collapsed bookshelf. Jihoon feels for his pulse, pressing fingers to his neck. At his touch, Wonwoo opens his eyes.

 

“You’re so bad at playing dead,” Jihoon tells him, choking on both his relief and the smoke in the air. He heaves the bookshelf from his leg and hooks his hands under Wonwoo’s arms, trying to lift him up. Wonwoo cries out in pain.

 

Jihoon lifts him up anyway, because Wonwoo’s beginning to cough and the gondola’s so full of smoke and steam that his skin is slick and he can no longer see the way out. “Just lean on me, I can carry us both,” Jihoon grunts into his ear, swaying under Wonwoo’s weight as well as his own. He’s light as a feather, but Jihoon’s knees still buckle.

 

Junhui’s eyes widen when he sees them, and he swoops under Wonwoo’s other arm to relieve Jihoon of him. They make their way to the door, and Jihoon tries the handle, but it’s bolted shut. He doubles over, coughing into his sleeve, and Junhui places his hand over his on the handle. It gives, and the door unsticks.

 

They tumble out, falling to the icy tundra just as the sun sets and the ballonet erupts in flames.

 

 

“Can you move your toes?”

 

“No.”

 

“Can you put any weight on it at all?”

 

Jihoon watches them through the ripple and sway of the orange flames, a small campfire Junhui somehow started, using nothing but the wet moss that grew aplenty here. It’s only warm if you sit on top of it- earlier, when Jihoon had stepped two feet away, he was drenched in a strange, terrifying kind of cold, seeing and feeling nothing but his white breath and numb fingers.

 

Junhui is crouched over Wonwoo, who’s lying down, his wolf a pillow under his head, nestled into her soft fur, injured leg stretched and stiff. He prods his ankle, then his shin, and it’s so tender that Wonwoo winces and nearly cries. Then he turns to Jihoon. “It’s broken, but I think I can mend it, at least part way.”

 

“Part way?” Wonwoo looks nervous.

 

“Just let me splint it now, if you’re going to make it worse by trying to use magic you aren’t sure of,” Jihoon says, beginning to rise from his perch.

 

“No, Jihoon, I’m going to mend his leg the best I can. And I’ll clean your shoulder afterwards,” he says, with that same certainty he’s exhibited on a few other occasions, so sure and commanding that any counter-argument Jihoon had dies in his throat.

 

He looks down, at himself, noticing for the first time how ripped his sleeve is, and how a deep gash, caked in now-dried blood, is etched along his shoulder. Now that he sees it, he grits his teeth, feeling the throb of pain running through his arm.

 

So Jihoon sits, feeding the fire damp twigs that he breaks against his shins, watching Junhui use shreds of cloth to bind Wonwoo’s leg. All the while, he mumbles words under his breath, gentle spells in northern tongue that Jihoon can barely decipher, and as the words begin to settle into his skin, Wonwoo’s face lightens and softens, as though warming under the firelight.

 

Junhui pats Wonwoo’s shoulder and asks him if he feels any improvement- at which Wonwoo nods vigorously- before bringing himself to where Jihoon sits. Jihoon shies away from him, curling into the darkness, keeping his eyes firmly on the fire. Junhui kneels next to him. “I need to see it in the light, Jihoon.”

 

Now his injured shoulder is facing the fire, the warmth pricking and stinging at the wound. Junhui’s fingers dance across his shoulder, pulling ripped fabric from ripped skin. Jihoon watches his face, noting how even the side drenched in darkness glows by its own golden light. Then Junhui leaves to scour the ground for sprigs and sprouts of things Jihoon didn’t know could grow in frozen soil, and he watches his spindly fingers work through the leaves and stems and roots, grinding them into a poultice.

 

As he presses it into his wound, Jihoon inhales sharply but doesn’t wince, and when he begins reciting more spells under his breath, Jihoon searches his face, mapping the freckles spangled across his skin. “I didn’t know you had magic in you.”

 

Junhui laughs, perhaps at his bluntness. His ears are illuminated with golden piercings, and they jingle and cast patterns on his cheeks when he shakes his head. “You learn a lot when you grow up alone in the tundra. Magic keeps you safe and alive in moments like these.”

 

Jihoon watches Wonwoo clean his camera with his sleeve; it’s one of the few small, insignificant things they could salvage before the airship caught fire. But there’s no use crying over their losses, not in Jihoon’s book, because it won’t revive and rebuild the twisted, melted metal that remains of it, a new landmark burned into this soil.

 

“We don’t have an airship anymore, and we carried you across the sea, yet you’re still here tending to us,” Jihoon suddenly says, watching Junhui press poultice-stained fingers to his wound, dabbing at the thick, oozing green pulp.

 

“I want to see you to the end of your journey. Unless my presence is troubling you and you’d rather I…?”

 

“You misunderstood me. I wasn’t telling you to leave.”

 

 

They walk slowly, bogged down by the elements as well as Wonwoo’s leg. It’s much better off than it was without Junhui’s magic, but he still limps, and the skin around the break is still flushed a deep purple. Junhui and Jihoon take turns bearing his weight on their shoulders, although Junhui insists on taking longer shifts (which Jihoon deliberately misconstrues and chooses to be irritated by).

 

Junhui reads the night sky as Wonwoo reads his encyclopedias. He raises his hand high above his head and taps and twists his fingers, as though moving clouds and rearranging constellations. He greets Orion and nods to the North Star, old friends he grew up beneath. As Jihoon is falling asleep one night, he opens his eyes to catch Junhui cupping droplets of moonlight in his hands, liquid silver making the skin of his hands glow. He drinks the light, and Jihoon thinks he can see it trickling down his throat and coursing through his body.

 

Sleeping under an open sky, surrounded by open hills and valleys that know no end, sends a chill through Jihoon’s bones. He keeps his back to the fire, his eyes on the empty blackness, his ermine tucked safe under his jacket, pressed to his heart. Sometimes, when the sun begins to rise, he sees wraiths and shimmering shadows wandering close to their campsite, and Junhui insists they’re harmless, lost spirits, but Jihoon can’t rest easy knowing they’re hovering just beyond his line of sight.

 

Wonwoo picks teeming handfuls of lingonberry from the bushes Junhui pointed out to him, humming a song to himself as he does. He eats his share of berries, and offers some to Jihoon, who nibbles tentatively at one, before spitting it back into his palm and grimacing. Junhui and his fox yip and laugh. Wonwoo’s wolf howls at the full moon, but the wind howls louder still.

 

“How long have you and Wonwoo known each other?”

 

“I’ve lost track,” Jihoon replies, taking the bowl of steaming soup- lingonberry and dried cod- that Junhui hands him, dipping his head down to blow the heat away and slurp at the froth skimming the top, licking his lips. “I can’t remember a time without him by my side.”

 

“Were your parents friends?”

 

“I… don’t remember parents ever being in the picture,” Jihoon responds slowly, shaking his head and emptying his lungs with a sigh. “It’s always only been the two of us.”

 

“That’s a fine coincidence, because parents were never in my picture, either.” Neither of them sound sad, or even affected, and Jihoon finds himself grateful for the smooth, conversational nature of Junhui’s questions. He probes, but never too deep.

 

“I at least had Wonwoo. You grew up…”

 

“Alone?”

 

“In a place like this,” Jihoon adds, looking around them pointedly, at the sun that sets too soon and rises rarely, the wind that uproots and hollows anything that tries to grow, the barren soil and the jagged rocks.

 

Junhui smiles and throws his head back, cupping the bowl in his hands and dipping it to his lips, downing the soup much too quickly. “Maybe it’s unforgivable, but I’m here now. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I guess.”

 

Jihoon shrugs and watches his hands as they stir the soup over the fire and ladle more broth into Wonwoo’s bowl.

 

“All I have is a jewel,” those same hands pat the cinched pouch hanging from his hip. “Although I may have dreamed up the part where my mother gave it to me and told me to hold onto it.”

 

Jihoon purses his lips and rolls his empty bowl in his hands, watching the dregs of broth swirl. He doesn’t like how personal and intimate this conversation is becoming, yet he finds himself adding droplets of fuel to its flame. “Is it a necklace?”

 

“More like a broken piece of something,” Junhui says, unhooking the pouch from his belt and pulling a chipped jewel from within it, dazzling and mauve, snug in his palm. He tells Jihoon to give him his hand, and Jihoon does, gingerly, pale pink palm fitting in Junhui’s almost as comfortably as the jewel does. Junhui drops it in his hands, and Jihoon admires it in the firelight.

 

The idea of a jewel- a broken jewel, a missing jewel- makes the cogs of Jihoon’s mind begin to move, but that idea alone isn’t enough to make them spin.

 

 

Soonyoung’s glare bores holes through Junhui, an ice pick to a shallow, frozen pond, looking through him as if he was splayed out and dissected. He sees his blood, he sees his heart, he sees the place he comes from, the place he’s returning to.

 

He doesn’t linger on Junhui, though, because it doesn’t take long for him to notice Wonwoo’s bent leg. His entire hologram shivers in the wind, as does his voice when he addresses him. “Why are you broken?”

 

“The airship. Crashed. Surely you’d have seen us struggling?” Jihoon replies on Wonwoo’s behalf, a barely-there hand hovering protectively over his shoulder.

 

“No. I thought avoiding you would divert the gods’ attention…” Soonyoung trails off, deep in thought, his finger pressing an indent in his plump, chapped lips. “So how will you get here now? You have mountain ranges and flatlands to cross.”

 

Jihoon looks like he’s reining himself in, rearranging his words so as not to instigate another argument. “We’ll walk. It’ll be slow, but Junhui can lead us through the north.”

 

Soonyoung shakes his head slowly, pulling his cloak of furs closer together, bunching it under creamy collarbones and pinning it with his fingers. “I’ll meet you once you’re over the peaks. Once you’re beyond them, you’ll reach marshes and lakes. I’ll meet you there.”

 

“Why can’t you just stay put?” Jihoon asks.

 

“You’re going to delay me,” Soonyoung tells him, waving him off with one hand. His eyes follow Wonwoo with a dangerous fixation, a cat to a string, a bear to a deer. He watches the expressions flitting across his face with a gleam in his eye, licking his teeth when Wonwoo meets his gaze. “It takes too much time to travel without that airship hastening it all.”

 

“Since when is this a timely matter?” Wonwoo leans closer as he speaks, to avoid having the wind swallow up his words, and so does Soonyoung, as though trying to climb through his hologram to press closer to Wonwoo.

 

“Unless you do have something to do with the gods’ anger and the world’s end?” Junhui adds, his fox bristling from where it sits in his lap.

 

Soonyoung scowls and crosses his arms tightly, fingers drumming against his upper arms. Snowflakes begin to form where the tips of his fingers meet his flesh, but he doesn’t seem to mind the cold. “My word is final,” he says, glancing at Wonwoo for one second too long. “I’ll meet you soon.”

 

Jihoon and Junhui turn to each other, exchanging pointed looks, and as soon as Soonyoung’s hazy, incorporeal figure is shredded away and lost in the fog, they round on Wonwoo.

 

“Nothing about him is normal,” Junhui begins plainly. “He sends shivers down my spine, but I can’t pinpoint why.”

 

“It’s because he’s the prince,” Wonwoo says, convincing words falling short at the uncertainty in the voice carrying them.

 

“I don’t think a prince would have the gods twisting and turning to find him, and I don’t think the prince would be in hiding,” Jihoon says. Wonwoo gulps and Junhui fidgets. “I don’t think a prince’s presence is supposed to evoke fear and turbulence, either.”

 

“There’s something else, too,” Jihoon continues, grim and quiet, holding his ermine in his arms as he speaks. “Have you ever considered his absolute lack of an animal familiar?”

 

 

Wonwoo considers it for a few days. The landscape encourages silence, lulling them into their own thoughts, the grey sky and grey earth and rolling sameness seeming vast enough to bear all of his worries, his thoughts hanging and spreading comfortably in the emptiness. It’s almost as though he leaves them here, discarding a trail of them behind him as he winds through the dips and bends of the hillsides. He wonders if he’ll pick them all up on their way back home… that is, if they’ll be going back home at all.

 

Wonwoo doesn’t know if he fears Soonyoung or if he fears this journey’s end. He doesn’t know if he fears him, or if he fears what he may do, or what may be done to Jihoon and Junhui by virtue of being attached to Soonyoung, in the gods’ eyes.

 

Wonwoo doesn’t know how he was naïve enough to trust Soonyoung’s words and promises, despite second-guessing himself at the time. He doesn’t know how he let himself wind them into this tightly-coiled loop, wrapped around Soonyoung’s finger.

 

It all stems from the prophecy, and it may as well be a death sentence now, because Wonwoo can no longer believe that Soonyoung is the prince, which makes their journey pointless, and further, riddled with many dangers, Soonyoung being only one of them. But they can’t turn tail and go home, because the gods await them on either side, because the damage has been done and they’ve become attached to whatever bounty Soonyoung has on his head.

 

 

At one point, Wonwoo wonders aloud, talking of how lucky they’ve been on land, plagued by nothing worse than harsh wind and twisting roots to trip over. Junhui nods but keeps quiet, not wanting to tell him that the sameness in the landscape isn’t how he remembers it being at all. There’s a mirage of change on the horizon, on the peak of the mountain range, but every time they come closer, it leaps out of reach.

 

They’ve been walking in a dizzying circle for days now, catching up to themselves so much that he’s beginning to see their old footsteps in the bog, so recent that they haven’t been eroded by the weather. He fears walking into ghosts of their former selves, lingering from days past, but he has no idea how to break free of it, and he can only hope not succumbing will eventually cause the magic to cease.

 

“Where are you going, Junhui?”

 

Junhui jumps, Jihoon’s question piercing into his thoughts and startling him out of his skin. He can’t have read his mind, so Junhui begins doubting himself, wondering if he’d been mumbling his worries aloud. “…in life, you mean?”

 

Jihoon sighs, expelling air from the bottom of his lungs. “I meant where were you going originally, before we sidetracked you.”

 

“Oh.” Junhui tilts his head to one side, no longer startled. Jihoon is scaling steep, snowy rocks, and he extends a helping hand, but Jihoon pushes it away. He arrives on the steppes, by Junhui’s side, without his assistance. “Well, someone told me I’ve been left a palace, a palace in my name, at the farthest tips of the north.”

 

“A palace? How many palaces and princes are there?”

 

Junhui’s eyes are moony and wide. “I never said I was a prince.”

 

“Then how do you explain inheriting a palace in a place where only monarchs dwell?” Jihoon retaliates, folding his legs beneath him as he comes down to sit next to Junhui. Junhui doesn’t want to push his luck (or push Jihoon farther away), but he can’t help noticing how much more comfortable Jihoon has become around him. He looks him in the eye now, he bids him good mornings and nights, he sits close to him without having to push Wonwoo in as a barrier between them.

 

“Maybe they’re wrong and the palace isn’t mine,” Junhui responds slowly, shrugging his shoulders, “but the fun is in the journey, not the destination, and that’s why I started it on such a whim.”

 

“You call this fun?” Wonwoo grunts, cutting through their conversation and making his eavesdropping known. He settles down on a flattened rock, wiping the sheen of cold sweat from his forehead before busying himself polishing his monocle with his jacket sleeve.

 

So they’ve met by chance on two unclear journeys, both of which end at monarchs’ doorsteps. Things begin winding into place, picking up speed, clicking and turning within Jihoon’s mind.

 

 

The peak sinks, dipping down at its very top. It’s entrenched in fog, curling around the mountaintop and hugging them as they step through it. Shreds of it cling to their clothes as they finally break free of it, and when it clears, they see what it’s been shrouding.

 

They’ve come to a crossroads. Four winding paths intersect at the peak’s heart, and abandoned guard-posts line the edge of each path, their painted stone walls chipped and crumbling. Cobwebbed streetlamps, too, but the lights within them have long since been snuffed out and frozen solid.

 

Four signs hang at the very heart of the crossing, creaking when the wind gusts between them. They point in all directions, east, west, north, and south, beyond them and behind them and on either of their flanks, and they all read one thing: _The Point of No Return_.

 

Jihoon’s laughter isn’t loud, but it crackles like thunder and echoes like a crow’s cry.

 

The view to their east clears, and they look over their shoulders and the shoulders of the mountains alike to see a thunderstorm, a cluster of dense clouds that surround, embrace, choke, one distant green peak. It’s a battle between land and sky, strategy and defense, a battle without armor, one that will only end when the mountains melt to mud and sand. The clouds pour themselves dry, and bolts of yellow lightning flash, illuminating the shapes within them. The sight is familiar, reminding them of their time at sea.

 

The fog to their west winds away, revealing a steep drop-off, jagged black cliffs that meld into black-sand beaches, so wide and vast that the ocean and its swirling tides are but a thin line of silver in the distance. Time, sleep, and death flow in these waters, because all three are things that flow unstoppably onwards, whether the world stops spinning, lies dormant, or ends. The tides come in, pooling and rising and taking with them everything the water can wrap itself around.

 

Behind them are the southern plains they’ve just risen from, and they’re uniform and manufactured- every ravine, every ridge on every ravine’s crest, and every leaf and tree on the ridges of the ravines, all mirrored perfectly in rows, onwards and onwards, so startlingly identical that it steals their breaths, sucking their throats dry. The structure is beautiful until their eyes adjust to it, because then they see how stripped bare it is, stripped of anything wild and free. It’s never-ending, it’s dizzying in its fairness, it’s fog and mirrors.

 

And the land stretching beyond them, stretching far beyond what their eyes can hold and handle, is blanketed in whiteness. There are clusters of lake and marsh between the white, glassy but not frozen, reflecting the grey sky and looking like dark abysses all the same.

 

Wonwoo’s wolf whines and cowers behind him, and Jihoon’s ermine disappears under his jacket. Junhui’s fox is crouched between his feet, tail between its legs.

 

Jihoon is the first to stumble out of the trance the sight put them in, and he’s the first to break the crisp hush that has fallen over them. He sounds incredulous, a shrillness in his voice that betrays the chill running through his body. “What was that about?”

 

“Deterrents,” Junhui tells them. “A warning, I guess. I think they’re showing us how much magic and chaos we’re about to walk into.”

 

Jihoon scoffs, taking long strides so Junhui, a crutch under Wonwoo’s weight, has to struggle to keep up. All they can see of him is his smooth black hair and his tweed shoulders, but they don’t need to see his face to know his lip is curled. “It’s a bit late for that, no?”

 

“Don’t test our luck, Jihoon. They admitted us without a hitch.”

 

“They?” Wonwoo asks.

 

“Not the gods. They’re just spirits that guard the mountain pass.”

 

 

The sun hangs low and lingers there, spreading rays of blinding white that span across the horizon and glint and bounce across the ice. The air took a much harsher turn as soon as they began descending from the peak and delving deep into the north, and now Wonwoo and Jihoon sit huddled together. Jihoon holds Wonwoo’s chapped hands in his, warming them, and they watch Junhui, a distant pinprick on their blinding horizon, scouring the ground for twigs and bits of anything flammable to light tonight’s fire.

 

“What do you think will happen when Soonyoung comes?” Wonwoo whispers, barely audible. He’s worried a storm is brewing on both fronts- a storm within Soonyoung, because no one knows what he’s capable of, and a storm from the gods when they detect his presence and purpose. And Wonwoo still wonders why the gods are angered by Soonyoung’s presence in the first place, because if he’s the prince, then the gods should be on his side.

 

“In terms of the prophecy, nothing.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Soonyoung isn’t the prince,” he tells him, “I’m sure of it now.”

 

Wonwoo is surprised by his sureness, but unsurprised by his sentiment, as it’s been underlying ever since he laid eyes on Soonyoung. But Jihoon telling him that he thinks Soonyoung is the wrong prince is nothing new, and brings them no closer to finding the true prince, wherever he may be.

 

“Do you want to know what I think?” When Wonwoo nods, he turns away, fixing his eyes on Junhui. “I think he’s the prince.”

 

The veil he’s been wearing ever since Junhui first stepped into the gondola slips, and his thin mask of distaste is replaced with something determined, something certain, and Wonwoo doesn’t know what to make of it. So he turns to watch Junhui instead, and he lets the idea settle in his mind, not unlike the snowflakes slowly drifting to the ground. His trust in Soonyoung’s right to the crown has unraveled and come apart, but if Junhui’s the true prince, why is he wandering these plains, stranded and castaway, and why is Soonyoung sitting in his throne?

 

Jihoon breathes voice into Wonwoo’s silence. “Before you doubt me, just watch him-“

 

“Gods know you do plenty of that for both of us,” Wonwoo smirks.

 

“You’re really asking for it-”

 

“Fine, sorry, I believe you,” Wonwoo interrupts. “But if you really think he is, why haven’t you told him?”

 

“Power is corruption, and him knowing of his own power might be his fall from grace. So don’t tell him.”

 

“Ever?”

 

“Oh, he’ll have to know when the time comes, but it might get to his head if we tell him before then.”

 

“I think he’s got his head screwed on quite right, Jihoon-“

 

“Your sense of judgment is terrible. Soonyoung is the definition of a ruler corrupted by the amount of power he has flowing at his fingertips, and you would’ve sworn otherwise until I changed your mind recently.” Wonwoo flinches at his words, and lets his head hang. He watches the soil between his boots, glittering, speckled with minerals and ice. “He’s a good person, and I’m afraid of this knowledge ruining him.”

 

Wonwoo looks up, so abruptly that he hurts his neck, just to look at Jihoon’s face, to make sure he didn’t imagine himself hearing Jihoon call Junhui a good person. His face is purposefully devoid of emotion, because he knows he’s being scrutinized by the person who knows him best, and at that, Wonwoo smiles.

 

Wonwoo changes the subject before the air around them begins to hang with heaviness as well as the fluttering flecks of snow. The wind whistles, howls, and bites, and Junhui returns to their campsite. Flurries of white catch in their hair, on the fabric of their clothes. “When is this golden moment where we tell him? I hope it’s sooner rather than later.”

 

Jihoon ends their conversation in a whisper. “Sooner. As soon as we learn why Soonyoung is wearing a crown that’s not his.”

 

 

It continues to snow even when the clouds clear away at sundown. The snow increases, in fact, manifesting in mid-air and floating down to stick to them and to their familiars; Wonwoo’s wolf sneezes when a snowflake lands on the tip of her nose. It dampens the small fire they sit in a circle around.

 

Junhui scans the pale blue sky. He’s silent, but his expression alone tells them that this isn’t a regular occurrence, even here in the north, even now as the world is ending.

 

Wonwoo has his back to the fire, and he’s beginning to nod off, his eyes focused on a faraway hill. He’s watching it fade in and out of his focus as it becomes harder to keep his eyelids from fluttering shut, and he doesn’t immediately notice the movement on its crest. Then his vision clears, and he sees a mass of bright white manifesting, rising with the earliest evening stars, its outline jagged. He adjusts his monocle in disbelief, and watches the silhouette, its fur glowing like moonlight, four heavy paws, rounded ears, and a long snout. All alone at the top.

 

Wonwoo tries to turn, to alert them of the polar bear, but he can’t seem to tear his eyes away. He knows how dangerous it is, but still he sits frozen, watching how it twists and turns, surveying its surroundings.

 

Their campsite is a candle in the dark, incandescent, a patch of tundra emanating orange warmth into the blackness surrounding it. It’s exposed, and the three of them are further illuminated by the light they sit around.

 

He hears Jihoon and Junhui gasp behind him just as the polar bear’s silhouette begins to change. It stretches, taking on another form, shifting and shaping, morphing into someone lithe and tall. The silhouette on the hill now stands, stark against the dying sky.

 

The sky closes up, the last of the snowflakes fluttering down.

 

“Should we put out the fire and hide?”

 

“I think it’s…” Junhui doesn’t finish his sentence, trailing off as he steps in front of them both, squinting to try and make out the figure. He’s disappeared among the brush, but if they all hold their breaths, they can hear his footsteps, both light and sinister, the pitter-patter of a predator, echoing closer with each step.

 

Soonyoung materializes out of the darkness and steps into their light. In the flesh, standing before them, bathed in their firelight. He and the fire are two sources of glow, but his seeps the warmth out of the air, and he’s surrounded by a haze, pulsing like starlight and moonlight and snow under a dark sky. His skin is translucent, glistening with the patterns of snowflakes embroidered into it, along the slope of his jaw and the sharp bones of his cheeks. Icicles are beginning to form in his hair.

 

He pulls his cloak of pale fur more tightly around him, concealing jutting collarbones and neck, looking at each of them, starting with Wonwoo and reverting back to him when he’s had his fill of the other two. He settles into the ground, sitting cross-legged, staring straight into the fire. His eyes don’t reflect its orange, however, for they glitter with their very own darkness.

 

“No words of welcome?” He asks no one in particular. He cuts through the stunned silence, and Wonwoo stirs, blinking for the first time in a while.

 

“It was in tip-top shape. The airship, I mean,” Wonwoo begins, picking up where they left off last time Soonyoung had talked to them. There’s a notable change in Soonyoung’s eyes when they find Wonwoo, and there’s a softening of his face and shoulders. It’s obvious to Jihoon and Junhui, as are Wonwoo’s ears when they burn red. “The northern wind sent it into a cliff.”

 

The hollow grooves where the missing jewels belong make his diadem seem even emptier in person. “We don’t play by your rules. You may come strong, and an avalanche will bury you alive regardless,” he says. When Soonyoung’s lips break into a smile, Wonwoo can almost hear the sound of ice fissuring down its middle. “The northern wind will strip you of your colours and wither you to a husk.”

 

 

“Does it still hurt?”

 

“No.” Wonwoo turns away, crossing his arms and refusing to meet Soonyoung’s eyes. Whenever they face each other, Soonyoung searches for them, tries his hardest to match his gaze, but Wonwoo won’t give him the pleasure. He offers him a cold shoulder- colder than any of his whistling blizzards- instead. “Junhui mended it.”

 

“But you’re still limping,” Soonyoung points out. Wonwoo’s sitting on the edge of a plateau, back propped against a boulder, leg stretched in front of him. It still throbs when he walks for extended periods of time, and there’s still an ache deep in his bone, but he’d sooner die than tell Soonyoung.

 

He bends down next to him, sitting on his knees and stretching a hand out from under his cloak, his eyes fixed to Wonwoo’s face. Wonwoo watches his fingers, trembling, faded at their tips, and notices for the first time that the skin of palm and the undersides of his fingers are black. Charcoal black. In stark contrast with the top of his hand and the rest of his skin. He sees rather than feels him prod at his shin. Then pain floods through his leg and he bites his lip, hissing. “You’re lying,” he says.

 

“And what are you going to do? Ice it?” Wonwoo snarls. His wolf prowls behind him- since his arrival, she and Junhui’s fox have taken to growling and bristling at even a whiff of Soonyoung’s heavy, musky scent.

 

Soonyoung pulls Wonwoo up, and slings his arm over his shoulders, lifting him almost completely off the ground. He’s feather-light, even more so to someone with the weight of the world collapsing on his shoulders.

 

Soonyoung walks a few feet behind Junhui and Jihoon, out of preference rather than burden, because he could be far ahead of them despite bearing Wonwoo, if he wanted. He lingers in the back, and his silence is habitual, a layer of thin ice that Wonwoo’s beginning to fracture. Their heads are dangerously close together, Wonwoo’s temple a hair’s width away from Soonyoung’s, his eyes wild and his skin emanating coldness onto Wonwoo’s face, when he finally speaks. “I never asked for your assistance, prince. You’re the last person I’d want bearing me.”

 

 

The air crackles and pops whenever Soonyoung and Junhui so much as look at each other. It could be the effect of their magic bouncing off of each other’s, or it could be the effect of the crown sitting on the wrong head, and Soonyoung knowing it belongs on Junhui’s. As far as that goes, Junhui remains clueless, and clueless in his wariness around Soonyoung, but Jihoon doesn’t know how much longer that’ll last, because storms are brewing both above and between them.

 

The marshes they’ve stopped to camp beside merge into the lakes through inlets of freshwater, carrying fish and tangles of grass and reed in with their evening tides.

 

“You can’t fish in the lakes,” Soonyoung interjects, when talk of supper arises. He doesn’t give a reason why, but Junhui nods nonetheless, and Wonwoo and Jihoon are left confused.

 

“But you can in the marshes,” Junhui replies good-naturedly. Soonyoung gives him nothing but a look in reply, stalking away to stand alone on the edge of their campsite. The mist near the marshes clings to their skin, making it dewy, their mussed hair damp, and the condensation freezes onto Soonyoung, decorating every inch of his exposed skin with tiny, glittering droplets.

 

Junhui fashions fishing lines from the twine he has hanging from one of his belt loops, holding the hook between his teeth as he braids it. Jihoon learns from watching him, and with only a few interjections from Junhui- only a few moments where he reaches over, folding his hand over Jihoon’s to show him how- he has a line of his own.

 

Junhui and Jihoon sit side by side, with just enough distance between their shoulders that the empty space is uncomfortably noticeable. Junhui, who has never spent two nights in the same place, and Jihoon, who would still be locked in his study if his interest in the prophecy hadn’t tipped the scales; worlds apart yet somehow together, here on the water’s edge.

 

“Something smells fishy,” Junhui says, sounding so far-away and lost in his own thoughts that Jihoon has to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

 

“That’d be the fish,” he tells him dryly, nodding to the pile of cod they’d accumulated, limp and shimmering in the weak sunlight.

 

“I was actually talking about Soonyoung.”

 

They turn their heads in unison, towards the distant shore, watching Wonwoo, propped on a boulder, fiddling with his camera. Soonyoung stands where the marsh water laps ashore, looking at the way it freezes when it comes near his boots. He has his back to Wonwoo, not knowing that he stands in the foreground of his landscape photographs- but Wonwoo’s not one to tell him to move out of the way.

 

“I don’t think we can go on like this for much longer,” Jihoon agrees. Junhui thinks he’s talking about the tension building between the four of them, and Jihoon is, but he’s mostly referring to Soonyoung’s missing links, and to the fallen pieces connecting Junhui to the crown.

 

 

“You shouldn’t touch these waters, not even with the tip of your finger.” They make the pebbles clatter as they walk, Soonyoung’s arms tucked into Wonwoo’s sides, wrapped around his wiry waist to support him. They reach the tip of a peninsula that juts from their campsite into the lake, and as soon as the opportunity presents itself, Wonwoo peels away, steadying himself and pushing Soonyoung’s hands off. “Trust me.”

 

“Why should I trust you?” Wonwoo doesn’t look up when he says it, doesn’t see how taken aback Soonyoung is, his eyebrows knit together. If he had seen the look on his face, he might’ve felt some remorse.

 

The lake is glassy, so clear and so still that they can see its devoid depths from where they stand. They can see that there’s nothing but a reflection of the sky within it, nothing living or moving to send any disturbance running through it. It doesn’t flow, but it ebbs, the ripples treading backwards and into a whirlpool at its heart.

 

“These waters are dangerous. There’s too much magic flowing within them,” Soonyoung says. He sounds serious, and he has no reason to lie about this of all things, but Wonwoo has no incentive to trust that he isn’t, either. “Their time flows backwards, and the tip of your finger is enough to suck you through them and into another dimension.”

 

Wonwoo rounds on him, leveling his face with Soonyoung’s. “You’re destroying the world, this crown and the throne aren’t yours, and still you claim them,” he spits, and this time, he sees Soonyoung’s eyes widening, sharpening, inches from his. “I have no reason to trust you.”

 

Wonwoo lowers his hand towards the water, intending to cup a handful and let it trickle between his fingertips, just to spite him.

 

“This isn’t a matter of stubbornness!” Soonyoung’s voice is a quiet, wild roar. He grabs his wrist, firmly but not painfully, pulling it away from the water. The underside of his hand feels soft but leathery. “Don’t touch these waters. You’ll trust me when Junhui tells you the same thing later.”

 

Wonwoo hears the bitterness in his voice. He’d whispered those last words out, but they crackled and boomed in Wonwoo’s ears, louder than a thunder-clap.

 

“Let go of my wrist,” Wonwoo starts to tell him, but he does it before he can finish talking. He steps away, and Wonwoo tries to walk off in the opposite direction, but he stumbles, and Soonyoung catches him in his arms. In the blink of an eye, his hands are back around his waist, and Wonwoo’s leaning into him to stay upright.

 

 

“I bet gold and a compass they’ll end up together somehow,” Jihoon says, after a few silent minutes spent observing Soonyoung and Wonwoo, the way Soonyoung leans towards him when he talks, the way Wonwoo pretends not to be looking at him as often as he is.

 

“What makes you so sure of that?”

 

“You just wait, Junhui,” he says, his line tugging as a fish takes his bait. “I already know Wonwoo’s infatuated with him. I can’t see a single reason why, but I know he is. And the way Soonyoung looks at him, as opposed to the way he looks at us? It’s like day and night.”

 

“I owe you every coin in my pocket if they do, because I think they’re friends and nothing more,” Junhui tells him, his smile hazy and dreamy. “Which is three or four coins, so nothing much.”

 

Jihoon pulls the fish from the water and sets it on the shore, and Junhui catches the look he gives him before he turns away. He responds as he’s unhooking the fish and setting it with the rest of their catch. “We’re not all made of research professor gold, Jihoon.”

 

 

Soonyoung skins and debones fish mercilessly. Wonwoo watches him out of the corner of his eye, looking away whenever Soonyoung tries to catch him in the act. He hasn’t talked to him in days, not since he carried him back to their campsite after their argument by the lake, but instead of dissipating with distance, the tension has doubled between them. And it does no harm (but no good, either) to steal glances, so he does.

 

Grilling fish is trickier for him. Junhui reaches over to help him, but he melts away and brushes him off, refusing his help and cutting his words to stubs. He manages, eventually, and to Wonwoo’s surprise, brings it to where he sits, a little ways away from the smoke and crackle.

 

“You haven’t eaten in two days.”

 

“And that’s not about to change,” Wonwoo says, looking back and forth between the vibrantly pink cod in Soonyoung’s hands, steaming visibly in the cold, and Soonyoung, on his knees so they sit eye-to-eye.

 

“Hey, Soonyoung,” Jihoon calls from by the fire, emphasizing his name as he breaks twigs against his shins. It rolls off his tongue strangely, like he has many other, more colourful names for him tucked up his sleeve. He sounds further smug when he imparts the knowledge Wonwoo has deliberately neglected to share, that he only knows from spending a lifetime by his side. “He just doesn’t like fish.”

 

Jihoon comes to stand by Wonwoo’s side, and Wonwoo won’t let him leave now that he’s here, tugging at his sleeve to keep him pinned to the spot.

 

Soonyoung looks as defeated as someone whose oversized crown catches every flicker of light, and whose white cape glows in the blackness of midnight, can be. He puts the fish aside and looks at Jihoon first, then at Wonwoo. “I’d like to have a word with you. Alone.”

 

Wonwoo shakes his head, and when Jihoon tries to walk away, he pulls him closer by the sleeve. Jihoon isn’t particularly enjoying being dragged into the middle of Wonwoo and Soonyoung’s tangle, and he never has enjoyed being in Soonyoung’s presence, but Wonwoo has no choice. He doesn’t want to be alone with someone so fickle and dangerous.

 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispers, but the words do nothing but harshen Wonwoo’s eyes. “Are you afraid of me?” He now asks, somewhat gently, tiptoeing around the visible and obvious, a fact he knows but wants confirmed.

 

“I have every reason to be.”

 

Soonyoung nods slowly, rolling his eyes. He lifts his crown, untangles it from wisps of silky black hair, and holds it in his two pale hands, fiddling with its grooves and carvings, watching the dapples of light it casts onto the ground. “I’ve done nothing but-”

 

“I don’t want to hear it,” Wonwoo interrupts, turning away from him.

 

He rises to his full height, addressing them all. Something in his demeanor changes when he does; he had shrunken to talk to Wonwoo, into someone soft-spoken and folded-in, but when he wants to, as he does now, he shifts and grows, becoming tall and unruly and truly menacing. “I know I’m the villain in your narrative, the big bad that needs to be defeated, but I’m giving you no choice but to hear me out.”

 

Soonyoung turns to Wonwoo, and his voice lowers, flattens, softens when he directs his last words to him, words intended for his ears only. “And if you still want to get rid of me afterwards, then I’d love to go at your hands.”

 

 

 

“Heavy lies the head that wore the crown,” Soonyoung’s mother’s voice had echoed around the throne hall, like a droplet breaking still waters. It had sent a ripple through the place, a new voice humming through the walls and commanding they heed her wishes.

 

She held the queen’s crown in her hands, and his father the king’s. They stood at the top of three steps that elevated the monarchs’ thrones, and blood dripped, gently, silently, from their hands to the marbled ground. It trickled down the steps and pooled at the base, a rich and royal red. Beneath their feet. To be scrubbed from underneath their fingernails and rinsed away.

 

They had fallen from grace once before, their wings charred and blackened and ripped away from them, horns cut to stubs, but this was their time to ascend, to take back what they thought was stolen from them. Although this king and queen had nothing to do with their fall, they had much to do with the gods and the heavens, and that association is a price they paid in empty veins and still hearts.

 

They cast the son of the king and the queen out into the blizzard, their mercy surprising, but less so when they asked the elements to take him instead, to whisk him away and embrace him without escape. The warmth of a child’s blood, the sound of their slowing heart, isn’t as satisfying to feel and hear, so they’d spared him. He took with him a jewel that his mother had plucked from her crown, and they knew it was in his pocket, clasped and hidden in his white-knuckled fists, but they let him have it, if only to comfort him in his last hours. They had a child of their own, after all.

 

Their son doesn’t share their thirst for power, blinding their eyes and barbing their hearts with thorns. But he’s blinded by their wishes, and he’s blinded by their words, shining brighter than anything else he’s heard, warming him more deeply than anything else in this snow, and what he has inherited is their valour.

 

“The northern crown is yours,” Soonyoung’s mother told him, time and time again, through seasons and over the ticking of the clock as it wound forward, pressing cold lips to his pink cheek, pressing a harsh crown’s weight into his soft hair.

 

The crown was much too heavy to place on a child’s head, and the price Soonyoung paid in return for his parents’ doings, in return for the crown being oversized and ill-fit, the blood flowing through his veins being impure, cursed, sent him toppling from the velvets and furs and skins he’d grown accustomed to.

 

It didn’t take long for the gods to notice the monarchs’ absence and the dark presence, shaping and shifting where they once stood, trying to fill in their empty thrones. In hindsight, Soonyoung sees the years that he spent living in the castle with his parents by his side as a thin sliver, those times a memory too short to do more than flit past his eyes.

 

They received what they’d executed. The only things left of them were the same crowns they’d plucked and worn so restlessly, and they clattered down the steps, discarded on the ground. A crown is powerless if not for the head it graces.

 

Soonyoung did nothing to warrant being pulled from his bed and blankets and thrust out onto the tundra, doors locked behind him. He didn’t know what his parents did was wrong, and he didn’t know that his blood wasn’t true and royal. But then again, the king and the queen’s son did nothing to warrant being cast out, either, and this was a warped attempt at justice and restoration, divine and precise and faultless. An eye for an eye, a child for another, and both for the wind and snow to take.

 

He spent hours at the doors, pleading and begging, pushing and prying, trying his best with the magic his mother had passed down to him and taught him how to cast. Soon enough he’d realize that he was locked from the inside out, and no one would hear his cries over the wind’s. He saw his parents fade away, the sight of them fresh, painted vivid on the backs of his eyelids every time he closed them, and he knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

 

Soonyoung left deep prints in the snow until he learned to cover his tracks. He spent too many nights alone, his polar bear a mere cub by his side, curled away from the bright moonlight, hiding from the twinkling, whispering stars, trying to seek warmth from a place where nothing could ever grow or thrive.

 

He’d shiver and clatter and shatter, bones stone-cold and hairs never settling, the tips of his ears bitten, the tip of his nose frosty. He sat, weak and broken, and the midday sun emerged from between the clouds, for the first time in weeks. It shined down on him, blinding his eyes with its whiteness. He heard sounds of happiness echoing in from the distance. Children’s laughter, bells chiming, sleds skidding on ice.

 

They’ve all let him down; the whole world has. And none of them will be there to help him up. None of them would look twice, try to catch him when he falls, embrace him when he cries.

 

The sounds were cold and bitter to him, and so he turned to the caws of crows over carrion, the howl of wind through chasms, for comfort.

 

“The only person who will look out for me is myself,” he’d thought, so often that it became a mumbled prayer, something to hold onto. It grew and grew until it became the truth, until he lifted himself, caught himself, comforted himself.

 

He grew against the grain, a flower blooming in snow, against all odds, against all gods. Soonyoung wanted to have his crown, and wear it, too, to reclaim, to spite, and to never let the sun shine again. To freeze the bells quiet and to hush the children’s laughter, but doing that would be incremental.

 

Soonyoung gathered the magic his parents had taught him and added to it from his own, traveled far and wide to obtain more spells, to delve and dip his fingers into darker, deeper magic. Magic that required no god’s approval to cast, magic that no god could have any control over.

 

The most powerful magic happened to be the most forbidden, and Soonyoung painted and soaked and stained himself with it, not a hitch in his breath, not a hesitation on his mind. One night, he obscured the heavens and eclipsed the moon with his clouds, and in darkness without shadow, he and his polar bear melted together to become one.

 

A familiar is an extension of its human, a second mind to consult and a second soul to lean onto, so doing this did nothing to Soonyoung’s heart. All it did was make him a much more potent version of his former self, stronger and braver, harder to pin and pierce. A threat that could no longer be stifled.

 

Soonyoung wanted to plunge the whole world in the same darkness he had to fight through. Soonyoung wanted to watch the sun flicker and die out. He was sharp, but he wasn’t not thorough enough, and they sensed his forbidden magic in the air that night, they smelled it lingering on his skin and saw its wisps clinging to his furs. And so the gods seized him, caged him, and threw him from the mountain he’d managed to climb.

 

They pushed him into the earth, and sent him to its very bottom. They sent him to a place he didn’t belong in, because his heart still pulsed loud. He had a long life stretching ahead of him, and the gods took it from him too soon. It was a stifling place, his breaths stolen, the air never fresh, parched and gasping, the arced ceilings caving in with every quake of the land above. Buried, dead but somehow alive, in a graveyard of ghosts and corpses, far under his world.

 

Among the undead milling about, with no aim and no recollection of where they came from and what lives they’d lived before coming here, Soonyoung was cornered. Clinging onto shreds of memory, piecing together everything this place was trying to force him to forget. Within a while of being there, he remembered nothing of his past, save for the crown, the throne, and the castle burrowed among the glaciers.

 

Those three things were what reminded him of what he deserved, what the world owed him, and why he was sent here to rot and fester.

 

Soonyoung paved, tore, and clawed his way out of his confines. He used force and magic, but his sheer determination was what did the most. He had soft crumbles of dirt caked into his bleeding, ripping nails and smeared to his skin. He ripped through hundreds and thousands of roots- the roots of long dead trees, and bones, the roots of humans.

 

Just when his lungs felt like they would collapse, full of hot, used air, he burst through. What started as a crack erupted into a fissure, stretching far and wide and splitting the earth apart. The seams of the earth came undone, and a gash was ripped open, a gaping wound on smooth flesh.

 

Soonyoung spilled forth, a headpiece of white bones, towering and twisted like branches, woven into his hair. His body flickered, his skin just translucent enough to be see-through, the edges of his body ghostly. Behind him, the underworld overflowed onto the earth and into his world, and he couldn’t be bothered to fix what he’d broken. He’d rather let the gods have at it, and attempt to contain the undead, attempt to seal what he’d undone.

 

He shed the headpiece on his ascent back to the farthest north- it fell from his head and landed in velvety snow, discarded and no longer a symbol to him. But despite shedding it, it remained a part of his namesake and his rise. Prince of ghosts, bone, snow, and north.

 

The castle was abandoned and empty when he entered it at last. It looked just as it did when he left it so long ago- he marked the only change in the entire place, and his was startling in its extremity. A cold wind gusted through the throne room. At its center was a table, and on it sat his jeweled crown.

 

“The northern crown is mine,” Soonyoung reiterated at last, plucking it gently, setting it to rest atop his head, beginning his rule, and sighing deeply for the first time in years.

 

 

 

Towards the end of his tale, many things happen in quick succession. The first being the wind, picking up and blowing the fire out, scattering ash and white smoke into their eyes.

 

Jihoon’s voice fills the darkness. “But the crown isn’t yours, and even you admit it now.”

 

Soonyoung’s cold silence spurs Wonwoo onwards. “If you just give him the crown, the gods will stop chasing us all, and everything will get better.”

 

“Him?” Junhui pipes up, whispering from somewhere to Wonwoo’s left.

 

Jihoon’s voice stems from very close to where Junhui’s came from. “You. He’s talking about you.”

 

“You’re too idealistic,” Soonyoung barks out, laughing harshly. “The gods will never stop chasing me. But I understand you don’t care about me as much as you care about the crown being on the right head.”

 

“I never-”

 

“You can fight me all you want, but I’m going to cut it short, Wonwoo: I’m not giving you the crown.”

 

“Tell me why you won’t.”

 

Soonyoung refuses to answer, and Wonwoo reaches out, grasping at nothing, trying to find him, maybe to hold him, maybe to steal the crown from his head. He can see his shape, vague in the dark, furs glowing softly, under a burgeoning, full moon that spills blinding light upon them. Until clouds come in, too strong, moving too fast, manifesting out of nowhere on their horizon.

 

“Guess who’s angry,” Soonyoung finally remarks, and Wonwoo can see the notch in his neck, stretched taut as he arches it to look at the sky. He can see his nose, his lips, and the shine of his eyes, until the clouds plunge them into absolute darkness.

 

The storm isn’t Soonyoung’s, because it carries no snow, and because he stands beneath it, as powerless as Jihoon, Junhui, and Wonwoo. Instead of snow, these clouds carry shapes and shadows of faces within them.

 

 

The storm follows them, stalks them, herds them through fields, around lakes, and down cliffs. It doesn’t relent for days, chasing them through uncharted lands that only Soonyoung seems familiar with, breathing down their necks so they can’t sleep without its fog trying to wrap around them.

 

At last, they reach a fishing town on a great lake’s edge, and the storm subsides, falling behind for just long enough. They stand knee-deep in snow, paving a path where there wasn’t one, and the view of the town, cascading down the hill and meeting the pebbled shores, takes their breath away.

 

Every house is a different colour, vivid and bright against the snow, reds trimmed with yellow and blues trimmed with green, but only one house glows with the warmth of light and homeliness. The whole place is abandoned and empty, front doors left open to creak and slam in the wind, no smoke puffing out of the chimneys, roads packed with untouched snow, not a footprint- hoof, paw, or shoe- in sight.

 

As they make their way through the town, they come across more of the wraiths. They glide over the snow, casting no shadows and leaving no prints, some of them children with dolls in their hands, some of them faceless and blurred. There are no signs of life in this town, save for the little, lit-up shack sitting at its outskirts.

 

That house is a beacon in the dark, and just the sight of it, of the buttery yellowness shafting through its windows and casting a haze on the whiteness outside, is enough to warm them from the inside out.

 

“I’ll lead the way over,” Soonyoung announces over his shoulder, right into Wonwoo’s ear. “Would you like to have Junhui help you the rest of the way?”

 

“What are you insinuating? That I can’t?”

 

Soonyoung looks at him, from the top of his bird’s nest of hair to his chapped lips, lingering on them as he speaks. “You might be tired,” he presses in close, so close that frost begins to form and spread across Wonwoo’s nose tip. His voice changes, and he smiles wickedly. “Or scared.”

 

“No such thing, Soonyoung,” Wonwoo says, and Soonyoung tries to use the tip of his finger to dab the frost from Wonwoo’s nose, but it just causes more to form, and Wonwoo leans away from him. He wipes it with the back of his hand, sneezes as feeling returns to his reddening nose, and gives Soonyoung a halfheartedly dirty look. “Go ahead, but keep me by your side.”

 

When they reach the front door, Wonwoo wipes the buildup of frost and flurry from the haphazardly tacked-up sign, and Soonyoung reads it, loud enough for Junhui and Jihoon to hear. “Jisoo’s Scrying Post: Closed. Try again tomorrow.”

 

“He’ll let us spend the night if we let him read our palms and foretell our futures,” Junhui calls over.

 

Where Wonwoo and Junhui seem nonchalant, if not excited, about having their futures foretold, Soonyoung and Jihoon seem disturbed, both their foreheads wrinkled.

 

“You know him?” Soonyoung sounds skeptical.

 

“I’ve heard of him,” Junhui replies, he and Jihoon coming up to stand on either of their sides. “He can probably do something for Wonwoo’s leg, too.”

 

Soonyoung and Jihoon brighten considerably at that, and Junhui reaches out to knock three times.

 

 

Jihoon expected Jisoo to be greyer, shabbier, but he stands tall and sprightly as he admits them into his house and shuts the door gently behind them.

 

The inside of his house explains all the light seeping and pouring from its doors and windows. The walls are floor-to-ceiling packed with artifacts, monuments, trinkets, memories, much like a messier, dreamier version of Jihoon’s study. They’re all magical, Jihoon is led to assume, if only judging by the charm and haloing light coming off of them.

 

Wonwoo sees Soonyoung in colour for the first time, prince of snow in a house glowing with the sunlight of a midsummer afternoon. It’s a pocket of something sweet and savoury amidst the snow and darkness, a faraway dream preserved long after its season has passed.

 

Soonyoung’s hair was always dark as a moonless sky, but something within him must have changed overnight, because it’s become a cold, silvery white, matching his cloak of fur and complimenting his pallid skin. It’s the same colour he becomes when his shape shifts into a bear.

 

He helps Wonwoo into one of the spindly armchairs, delicate on his leg, and Wonwoo can’t seem to tear his eyes away.

 

“Are any of you hungry?” Jisoo asks.

 

“Not for fish,” Jihoon grumbles, collapsing onto the arm of Wonwoo’s chair.

 

“Then shall we get right to it?” He stretches his neck and hands, one finger at a time, before lifting a crystal ball from one of the shelves and placing it at the center of his table, in the very middle of the intricate pattern sewn across the tablecloth. The liquid within the ball is deep blue, and still as though frozen, even when Jisoo is moving it.

 

“It may interest you to know that the water’s collected from the great lakes, because the heavy magic that causes the lakes to flow through different dimensions, backwards through time, aids me in understanding your future through your past.”

 

“So you can read minds, too?” Jihoon sounds less than happy.

 

“It’s just frequently asked.” Jisoo chuckles and brushes him off, steadying his gaze and stretching his fingertips taut to meet the sides of the ball. He closes his eyes, and they dilate when he opens them, gaze locked.

 

 

“You came from the clouds?” He lilts up, but it’s not a question, because he knows the answer- he’s just surprised. He looks back and forth between Jihoon and Wonwoo in particular.

 

“Yes, in an airship?” Jihoon supplies.

 

“No,” Jisoo is soft-spoken, “You’ve fallen from the sky twice, but you must not be able to recall the first time. But it is why something within you two still yearns to be high above the earth, and why you found a way to fly despite broken wings.”

 

 

Angels aren’t always meant to stay within the clouds. Fallen angels don’t have wings, and fallen angels are indistinguishable when left among mortals, in a world full of them.

 

Wonwoo and Jihoon remember none of it at all. Their pasts were taken from them, their memories wiped clean for a new start somewhere far away, dangerously different than what they were used to- but somewhere where they were needed most.

 

They’ve tried to remember before, but their memories never go beyond the feelings of each other’s hands, fingers entwined together, promising never to let go. That’s as far back as the memories take them. They remember whiteness, then blackness, then the grey of the new world sprawled before them when they awoke.

 

They remember waking in a bed of molted white feathers and glittering dust, on the asphalt of an empty alleyway.

 

They remember feeling coldness for the first time, the absence of the warmth and comfort that was somehow such a constant to them. The absence of the weight that usually clung to their backs, rooted at two points beneath their shoulder-blades, a weight they took for granted until it was gone.

 

And everything beyond that point is as easy to recall as if it had happened yesterday. They were lost, then found, by alumni leaving the school on the boulevard just outside the alleyway they woke in. They wrapped them in winter coats and took them in, not into an orphanage, but not quite into a conventional home. But from there and until they moved away to the university together, it was the only thing they knew to define it by. As close to home as they’d come to having in a world that wasn’t theirs to walk.

 

 

“You knew all along?” Wonwoo interrupts, gleaning as much from the unsurprised expression dressing Soonyoung’s face.

 

“You two have a glow about you,” Soonyoung entwines his fingers and sets them on the tabletop. “I can almost see the ghost of your wings sometimes, if I look closely enough.”

 

“That’s why I saved you, on that cliff where we first met,” Junhui breathes. “I could see that you weren’t a wraith, but I could see that you weren’t just anybody, either.”

 

“You were sent down to bring the prophecy together. You connect the sky to the earth,” Jisoo says, and here he looks at Junhui, fidgeting in his seat beside Jihoon, and then at Soonyoung, whose lips are pursed tightly. “The link needed for everything to fall into place.”

 

Gods and angels, skies and heavens, stretching down to brush with demons and monarchs, earth and what lies below its surface, the task of making two worlds meet falling into Jihoon and Wonwoo’s hands.

 

“The prophecy?” Wonwoo asks.

 

“That’s the thing with fate, isn’t it?” Jisoo leaves the table to bring a weathered old book from a cabinet in the corner of the room, setting it in front of them and sifting through it, opening it to a page that seems unremarkable, black ink on browned paper, until Wonwoo notices the seams and bits of ripped paper near its spine. A missing page, ripped clean. “Many don’t believe in it, but I think it plays an interesting role in the grand scheme of things.”

 

Jihoon pulls the prophecy from his pocket, unfolding it delicately, taking his time, aware of every eye in the room being on his hands as he does. When he speaks, he slides it across the table towards Jisoo. “You wrote it?”

 

“Oh, no, it’s from this book- a book of prophecy- that I’ve borrowed and safeguarded for years. The person I’m keeping it for lost the page years ago. He tore it out and dropped it in the lakes, which is how it traveled away and eventually ended up in your hands.” Tucked away on a library bookshelf, mountains and islands and oceans away.

 

Jisoo smiles, his eyes twinkling like the trinkets glittering on the shelves around and behind him. “When it boils down to it, despite our origins and the prophecies written about us, we all hail from the same heavens, and we’ll all fall under the same earth.”

 

“Not if I can help it,” Soonyoung mutters, lip curled and glazed with dried blood. Wonwoo elbows him quiet.

 

 

The sunny warmth within his house lulls them all into an illusion of comfort, despite the storms and wrath waiting for them, just outside Jisoo’s doorstep. Jisoo lays four cots out for them, piled high with goose-down blankets, and as he gathers gauze and tiny vials of ointment and salve to mend Wonwoo’s leg with, Jihoon comes to him with a question.

 

“Do you tell fortunes?”

 

Jisoo asks for his hands. He runs his index along the lines etched into Jihoon’s palm, and once he’s done, he gives him that same dazzling smile from earlier. All he does is nod his head towards something behind Jihoon, and when Jihoon turns, he finds Jisoo looking between him and Junhui, who sits unaware, immersed in a book he plucked from one of the shelves.

 

Jihoon’s cheeks warm in understanding, and he turns away, hands balled into fists, nails digging into his palms.

 

 

Wonwoo can feel Jisoo’s magic leeching the pain from his leg, and he can feel his bone realigning and reconnecting, and it’s not as unpleasant as he anticipated it would be.

 

Jisoo’s fingers are gentle, as are his whispered spells and prayers, and by the end of the mending process, he has to remind Wonwoo to stay still, because Wonwoo’s regained feeling in his leg and he itches to use it again, to walk and run on two feet without anyone’s assistance.

 

Jisoo watches Wonwoo’s eyes trailing across the room, landing on Soonyoung, curled up and fast asleep in one of the armchairs, and lingering on him. “You’re drawn to him by much more than compass and spell and prophecy.”

 

Wonwoo flinches, bewildered by Jisoo’s observant, uncanny nature, and begins to rise to his feet.

 

“One more thing before I let you go,” Jisoo says, holding used, green-stained gauzes in his hands. “Don’t waste your time looking for the North Star in the night sky.”

 

“ _Wh_ \- why?”

 

“It has already fallen for you.”

 

 

It’s daybreak when they stumble out of his house, making fresh prints in the snow that fell overnight, but being out of his presence and away from his knowing smile does nothing to ease their nerves. Wonwoo and Jihoon are still thoroughly bewildered- by everything Jisoo told them, from their pasts to their futures- and the world outside seems to reflect that.

 

It’s daybreak, but that doesn’t mean the sun rises. All that happens as they stumble through the snow and towards the lake’s shore is the sky lightening briefly and drenching the snow and the mountains in its cold colours. A harrowing wind blows, an owl’s hoot echoes through the flatlands, and they all shiver and pull their jackets tighter around them- save for Soonyoung, who closes his eyes to bask when it ghosts through his furs and hair.

 

“The water’s shallow here,” Soonyoung says, staying by his side, and although it’s become a habit of his after a while of helping Wonwoo walk, Wonwoo isn’t very keen on giving him the benefit of the doubt.

 

“Yes, about as shallow as you are.” He crosses his arms, but he doesn’t walk away, even though he can now.

 

Soonyoung sighs. “Is this all still about the crown?”

 

Wonwoo nods. “You say it’s heavy, but you refuse to give it up. And judging by the way it slides around on your head-”

 

“That’s a low blow,” Soonyoung interrupts. “Try bearing its weight for half as long as I have.” The heaviness Soonyoung speaks of isn’t its physical weight- it’s about the weight and baggage that come with wearing it. But still he takes it off, smoothing the velvet and polishing frost off of the jewels, before bringing it over to Wonwoo and attempting to place it on his head. Wonwoo swats his hand away and covers his hair with his hands.

 

Soonyoung sees them reflected in the lake’s glassy surface, and he peers over to look over his reflection more closely. His eyes widen when he sees his hair, now silver and leached of colour, for the first time. He reaches up to touch it gingerly, and if Wonwoo wasn’t so concentrated on holding his grudge against him, he’d probably have softened into a smile. “When did this happen?”

 

“Yesterday.”

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

Wonwoo shrugs, his gaze lingering on his messy, snow-white hair.

 

“Do you… like it?” Soonyoung ventures, a crooked little smirk blossoming.

 

“I hate it,” Wonwoo decides.

 

“ _Liar_. I’m keeping it. Just for you.”

 

“I care more about your crown than the hair beneath it,” Wonwoo huffs, as much a liar as Soonyoung accused him of being, lying through his teeth just to change the subject back to an attempt at convincing Soonyoung to relinquish his crown.

 

“You can take the crown over my dead body. And considering I’m not exactly alive as I’m telling you this,” Soonyoung spreads his fingers, showing Wonwoo his leathery, black, snowshoe palms- residual from his polar bear familiar, now swallowed up within him- and his wispy, translucent fingertips, fading when the wind blows through them, residual after his time in the underworld, “that makes it pretty out of your reach.”

 

“Tell me why you won’t,” Wonwoo repeats, refusing to back down, fearless now, even in the face of a demon, a boy, a prince like Soonyoung.

 

A growl sounds from deep in Soonyoung’s throat. “If I give it up, I die. I’m in hiding because the gods are looking for me. They want my blood. They want me gone once and for all, because I’ve expended all my chances.”

 

Wonwoo is taken aback, if only for a moment. He doesn’t want Soonyoung dead, and he didn’t think the stakes would be this high, but everything adds up, and it all falls into place, and he thinks he understands now. “So it’s easier to fight a losing battle and attempt to use me to patch up the gash you’ve ripped?”

 

“No.” Soonyoung paces in a circle around Wonwoo. “I’d give it up if it didn’t mean giving my life up, too.”

 

“Junhui won’t let the gods take you,” Wonwoo tells him, reaching out to steady him. He feels guilt (but not regret) pulsing through him, at how panicked and flighty the conversation- especially out in the open, on the tundra, under endless skies- makes Soonyoung. How vulnerable it makes him feel, laying himself out for Wonwoo, finally spitting out the reason he’s been running away, locking himself up, refusing to give up what little he’s been holding onto in desperate vain. No one wants to die, deep down. No monster, no demon, no prince, not even a boy who has nothing left to lose.

 

“And why should I trust Junhui, Wonwoo?” Soonyoung breathes hard through his nose. “With my life, no less?”

 

Wonwoo’s hand slides down Soonyoung’s arm from where he’d gripped his shoulder, past his wrist and over his hand. He wraps his fingers over his, and rubs his thumb along Soonyoung’s knuckles. “Do you trust me?”

 

Soonyoung stiffens beneath his touch, but his answer is quick, like he didn’t need to give it any thought, which makes something within Wonwoo stir. “Yes.”

 

“Well, I’m the link between you two, because you trust me, and I trust him not to let you die,” Wonwoo says, and the feeling within him burgeons, making him want to pull Soonyoung closer and hug him tightly, but he swallows it down instead. “He’s not like his parents- or yours, for that matter. And he’s certainly not as deceitful and reckless as the gods. He’s kind.”

 

Soonyoung stands there in silence for a while longer. Then he breaks their hands apart, and when he turns away, Wonwoo thinks he sees a tear trickle down his cheek, but it’s so momentary that he can’t be sure, because it freezes and blends with the other frost speckling his face almost immediately.

 

 

It’s dawn- or dusk, or midnight (the sky is a deep, sunless blue regardless of the time)- when Soonyoung and Junhui huddle together on the periphery of their campsite. Jihoon wishes he could hear their exchange, but since his ears only catch snippets of the northern tongue, which neither he nor Wonwoo speak, he settles for watching them from afar instead, because only Wonwoo would stoop to eavesdropping.

 

Had he been able to hear them, he’d have heard Soonyoung asking Junhui what reason he has to trust him not to let the gods take him and slit his neck, and entrust the crown to his head and the castle and its kingdom to his reign.

 

“I have nothing against you,” Junhui begins, sitting down on a slab of rock. “I have no reason to dislike you, and no reason to want you dead. I only learned about you after meeting Jihoon and Wonwoo. And I don’t think I’ve given you reason to hate me… not yet, anyway.”

 

Soonyoung raises an eyebrow.

 

“I don’t really want the crown. I’m not fit to be a king. But this,” and here, he gestures at the thundering sky, “won’t stop until I sit in the throne and have the crown on my head, will it?”

 

Soonyoung nods. Warily, begrudgingly, bitterly. “My parents-”

 

“We were both wronged. The gods robbed us of our childhoods quite evenly.” Junhui waves him off before he can even string the words together. “I won’t let them wrong you again.”

 

Soonyoung remains unsure, but a reverberating crackle, and fissures beginning to spread along the sky’s surface, through which crumbs of dying, burned-out stars fall and begin to land in craters on the hills across from theirs, force him into decision.

 

Junhui holds his pinky out to promise, and Soonyoung hesitates before clasping it with his own.

 

 

The only unmarred path to the castle is to enter the jagged, narrow glaciers, trapped in passageways of blue ice, only to come out the other side on the castle’s bay’s edge. They would have never stepped foot in there, beneath thousands of years’ worth of stacked, creaking ice, just barely molded together, ever-changing and ever-melting and reforming, had the sky not been falling apart in flaming bits.

 

The sounds of collision and destruction are dulled by the layers of ice surrounding them, and they feel trapped in a warped, quiet world separate from the one outside. A draft blows through the narrow passageway.

 

They settle by nighttime (or, what they remember to be nighttime), but they can’t light a fire to keep themselves warm. Wonwoo and Jihoon huddle together to conserve and exchange body heat, and Junhui joins them soon enough, but Soonyoung sits alone, not even attempting to stop the frost forming across his cheeks, not even attempting to wrap his furs more tightly around his goosebump-ridden skin.

 

On one of these nights, Wonwoo grabs his hand and holds it in his. “You’re so cold,” he mutters disapprovingly, and Soonyoung is too surprised by him to react. “Doesn’t it ever feel uncomfortable? Don’t you crave warmth and touch?”

 

Soonyoung doesn’t know how to answer, because he’s never thought of things like warmth and closeness as within his reach. He doesn’t know what it feels like to ask for something and actually receive it. What he does know is that he’s attracted to Wonwoo’s warmth, to the heat coursing under his skin, wrapped around his cold hands and burning them.

 

“Humans crave touch, and the warmth of other bodies, of skin pressed against theirs. It’s alright to want that sometimes, Soonyoung.”

 

“How human am I at this point?” Soonyoung counters, choking out a laugh, his breath pluming white.

 

“Don’t say that,” is all Wonwoo tells him. Icicles begin to spread across Wonwoo’s hands, the effect of holding Soonyoung’s, of touching Soonyoung for an extended period, weaving over the ridges of his knuckles and spreading a sheen over his fingers, but he squeezes it tight and tries to dispel them. Soonyoung will have to push him away soon. “Have you ever tried wrapping your furs around yourself for warmth rather than costume? Have you ever tried sitting near a fire and stretching your hands to it?”

 

His tone isn’t shy of accusatory, and Soonyoung bristles at it. “I haven’t, but I certainly don’t need you trying to tell me how to live in the cold after surviving through it on my own all this time.”

 

“That’s the thing,” Wonwoo continues. His hands are pink, wet with melting ice that runs from Soonyoung’s fingers onto his. Soonyoung’s touch may numb his hands, but Wonwoo’s thaws him down. “You survived. You didn’t live. You were all alone. That’s why your heart’s such an icebox.”

 

“Then set it on fire, Wonwoo.” Soonyoung would growl and bare his teeth and recoil, but Wonwoo’s touch has made such a change within him, a stirring, a warmth that spills from his still heart, beginning to spread from the center of his chest, that he can’t do anything but snap back weakly.

 

It’s not a question or a command. It’s spoken like a given, like a clue, a light in the dark. Like that’s what Wonwoo’s already doing to him, and he’s just trying to let him know.

 

 

There’s a crag in the ice through which the smoke can escape, so tonight they light a small fire, but the inside of the glacier still glitters, layers of ice casting shadows and blue glow across their faces.

 

Junhui and Jihoon are fast asleep, arms stretched towards each other, their fingertips almost touching, a movement away from being hand-in-hand.

 

Soonyoung is coaxed into sitting by the fire. He has his knees to his chest and his arms wrapped around them, watching it crackle merrily. His flesh looks marbled and stiff and frozen-over, but when Wonwoo touches it, it turns soft, delicate in his hands.

 

“Soonyoung, you aren’t thawing from the fire,” Wonwoo realizes, his thoughts rolling off his tongue, too fascinated by the look of Soonyoung’s skin reflecting the flames. He wants to be cruel about it, to tease him for it, but the words die in a stuttering gurgle in his throat when he realizes that it’s all because of him. That he’s melted Soonyoung down, with nothing but sweet words and sweeter hands. “You’re thawing because of me.”

 

Soonyoung brings a hand to his rosy cheek, fingers twitching at the shock of warmth circulating beneath his translucent skin. He’s never flushed before. He’s never felt his blood circulating, coursing hot through his veins, spreading liveliness through him. His heart hasn’t beaten this loudly and blithely, pounding against his ribs, since he resurrected himself. He feels alive, for the very first time.

 

Wonwoo comes closer, and Soonyoung leans away, pressing a hand against Wonwoo’s chest and pushing him back. His hair is now glistening and wet, snowmelt beginning to run down his cheeks, in streaks that shimmer down his neck. His hand spreads frost across the fabric of Wonwoo’s jacket. “Stop, you’ll-”

 

But Wonwoo presses in anyway, his arms wrapping slowly around Soonyoung’s neck. His teeth chatter, and a violent shiver runs through his whole body, but he doesn’t let go. He pushes into him, holding him tightly in his arms.

 

He hugs him for everything. For the guilt he feels. For all those years Soonyoung had to spend cold, from the inside out. For all those years he spent alone, something no one should have gone through. This is something he’s wanted to give him ever since he heard his story.

 

It’s sincere, warm even if Wonwoo’s body hadn’t already been. It lasts until he feels the pulse of a heart against his chest, instead of a faint thrum where one should be. Until his breath feels less like arctic wind, until it ghosts hot over Wonwoo’s cheek. He can feel wetness, of cold snowmelt, seeping into his clothes and soaking them.

 

Soonyoung feels like winter, but he melts like spring.

 

Nothing else, no one else, not even the gods above or the demons below, can make Soonyoung this weak and this powerless. Nothing can strip him of his only eternal magic, the only power that’s always thrummed through him- ice and snow. Only Wonwoo.

 

It’s when Soonyoung forces them apart that Wonwoo notices what effect the embrace had on him. The cold had been such a shock to his body that it had numbed and lulled him, and if Soonyoung hadn’t noticed his rapidly cooling skin, he would have withered away in his arms. His monocle is frosted over and cracked.

 

He’s taken all of the cold that was within Soonyoung, snowballing over the years, his heart wrapped not in barbed wire and thorn but in icicles, and left him with nothing but the frost on the surface, the one decorating his skin and spreading gently from his fingertips.

 

Wonwoo’s organs hurt, and his joints feel sucked dry, crackling with every movement. Pain flares up under his ribs, along his chest, spreading like ice over a lake. Sharpness digs deep into his gut, a knife stabbing deep and twisting, causing him to clutch at his waist and gasp for air. His spine feels like it was broken and mended together hastily. He’s freezing over, and when he puts his lips together, they’re so chapped and dry that they stick and chafe. His tongue is rough. His breath burns his throat.

 

Soonyoung wants to warm him, and he can now, but he’s afraid of hurting him further. So he brings Wonwoo closer to the fire instead. Soonyoung’s thawed, and now Wonwoo blooms. Slowly, colour returns to his skin, and feeling to his bones.

 

“What happens if I hug you again?” Wonwoo asks, hushed, his eyes drooping closed.

 

“I don’t know. You nearly froze to death.”

 

So Wonwoo comes closer anyway, and Soonyoung tries not to flinch at the feeling of someone trying to hug him, because it’s a feeling he didn’t know he’d been missing all this time, and he wants to grow used to it. Wonwoo burrows into his chest, sinking into his soft furs and his fragrant skin. He can feel Soonyoung wrapping the furs around them both, drawing him in closer, cloaking him in his touch, blanketing him in his scent.

 

He whispers sweet incantations into Wonwoo’s ear, and his hand settles somewhere between the jut of his hipbone and the crook of his waist, rubbing and thumbing warmth through him. Wonwoo can feel his chest thrumming, pulsing, gurgling where his head is pressed to it. What he can’t see is Soonyoung’s face, alight with stifled pleasure.

 

He wakes curled in Soonyoung’s white furs, soft against his cheek, warm but empty. He wants to rise, but his whole body protests, still numb and sore, wounded from within. He yawns and looks around, his eyes taking a while to adjust, but he finds Soonyoung sitting and watching him, a few feet away, looking considerably smaller and softer without his furs. Wonwoo’s wolf is curled at his side, her head tucked into his lap.

 

“Sleep comfortably enough?” He asks. Wonwoo can’t tell if he’s teasing him.

 

Jihoon and Junhui are packing what little supplies they’ve been carrying with them, and they look between Wonwoo and Soonyoung before exchanging pointed looks, Jihoon’s eyebrows raised and Junhui’s lips curled. Wonwoo thinks he sees Junhui slip something into Jihoon’s pocket.

 

It’s fun to watch Soonyoung and Wonwoo deny what’s between them, but the minute it becomes about them, Junhui and Jihoon are far worse about navigating the plain that is their emotions and their strangeness around each other. Jihoon thinks he needs a compass and a map for that, but all it takes is intuition and feeling, and Junhui is clueless, but it’s painted across his face- Wonwoo thinks that’s why they do nothing but go in circles.

 

 

The sky and the world outside go quiet. Jihoon calls it the calm before the real storm, and Junhui calls it a chance for fresh air. Either way, they build a fire in the open tonight, and spread their blankets over lichen and under a broken sky.

 

Wonwoo and Soonyoung are fast asleep in a huddle together, their shape vague and indistinct. It’s unclear where Wonwoo ends and where Soonyoung begins.

 

Junhui is poking at the fire, sitting up straight, and Jihoon is curled as small as he can make himself, sleeves pulled over his hands, ermine in his lap. Junhui’s fox has been gravitating towards Jihoon lately, weaving between his legs and sitting near his feet, and tonight marks no exception.

 

“Look up,” Junhui says softly. In the fractures of sky that remain hanging above them, he sees shooting stars, some leaving trails, gold and silver etched into his eyes until they fade, some flashing by so quickly he hardly believes he saw them.

 

“Meteors, huh,” Jihoon mumbles. “Does that mean we’re getting close to the pole?”

 

Junhui nods. “Have you heard what they say about clear nights and shooting stars?”

 

“Is this another one of your northern things?” But Jihoon spurs him on, too worn-out to be upset at him for being dreamy even about the world’s end. “I’m sorry, what do they say?”

 

“A kiss under these meteors grants the two twelve lifetimes’ worth of fortune,” he says. “Or something like that.”

 

Jihoon scoffs. “You don’t sound too sure of it yourself. Why twelve lifetimes, and not, say, thirteen, anyway?”

 

“I don’t know.” Junhui goes quiet, breaking a hollowed log into coals and patting them down into the bed of ashes. “But about kisses.”

 

“What about them?”

 

“Have you had yours?”

 

Jihoon yawns- very mechanically, very artificially- and rolls onto his side, giving Junhui his shoulders and his back. “You’re too forward,” he mumbles.

 

Junhui blushes, eyes like saucers. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

 

 

“It’s raining blood and meteors are hurtling into the tundra. How much farther until we get to the castle?”

 

Jihoon isn’t nervous- calling him nervous would be an understatement. They’re running late, and they’re hiding deep beneath quaking glaciers, and he doesn’t know how much longer the world can hold on and wait for them to make their way to the castle to stop it from collapsing.

 

Soonyoung answers him casually. “We’re safe here. The gods may have found us, but these walls are made of more than just ice.” He runs his hand along their grooves and sharp, glinting cuts.

 

“I know, but how much longer until we get there? A day or two at most, I hope?” Wonwoo chimes in, and Soonyoung’s face changes when Wonwoo’s voice is the one echoing through the maze of dark chambers and halls. He takes a subconscious step backwards when Wonwoo steps near him.

 

He gulps audibly and marches off without answering, leading far ahead of them, pretending he doesn’t hear Wonwoo every time he tries to talk to him. This continues for hours, until they find themselves in a wide room, off of which chiseled tunnels stretch, leading to a set of caves, their ice walls thin enough that they can see shadows of the world outside through them.

 

Wonwoo follows him into one of the tunnels, and notes the way his neck and shoulders tense when he sees him. “Don’t shy away from me, Soonyoung,” he says.

 

“I’m not.”

 

“You are.” Soonyoung leans against one of the walls, and if Wonwoo wants to face him, which he does, he’s forced to stand too close for either of their comfort. “Are you afraid of me now? Are we finally even, now that I’ve melted you down?”

 

“Not afraid. Get out of my face, Wonwoo,” he tells him, but there’s no bite in his words. Wonwoo can almost hear his heart, its beating pulsing through the walls.

 

“Will you turn me into an ice sculpture if I don’t?” Wonwoo teases, leaning in. When the tip of his nose brushes against Soonyoung’s, a dusting of pink dresses it, and Soonyoung can’t concentrate on anything else anymore.

 

“One of these days, I just might, if you keep stepping on my toes-” Soonyoung’s breath catches when Wonwoo pushes in, propping himself against the wall behind Soonyoung, arms stretched on either side of his face.

 

Soonyoung tilts his chin up, and the sweetness of Wonwoo’s pink lips, his soft pink everything, is what surprises him most. He’s never tasted something so gentle, and in a lifetime of being chased, he’s never felt so wanted. So loved, so desired.

 

Wonwoo comes away frostbitten, glittering ice dusting the bow of his lips. This close, he can see the patterns of snowflakes, drawn and sewn into Soonyoung’s skin, and the bits of velvety white stuck in-between his eyelashes.

 

“Your lips…” Soonyoung says, raising a hand to thumb the frost away, and leaving his finger hooked in the corner of Wonwoo’s lip.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“Fine enough to do it again?”

 

“Eager, are we?” Wonwoo says, playing with the purple velvet of Soonyoung’s crown. Soonyoung reaches up with his other hand, slowly and carefully removing Wonwoo’s monocle so he can kiss him better, deeper this time. Then he cups him where his jawline meets his cheeks, feeling Wonwoo blush hot under his ice-cold, blue fingertips.

 

Wonwoo comes close so fast that Soonyoung’s vision swims. Or maybe that’s just the effect Wonwoo has on him, the same way he lingers on his lips. He holds Soonyoung’s face in his hands, too, as though it’s all a dream and he’s holding onto him, keeping him close before he slips away. Soonyoung looks up at him, waiting, watching Wonwoo poised as though about to leap, as though the whole world is at the tips of his fingers- and it may as well be, to him.

 

When he kisses him again, fuller and more confident this time, Wonwoo feels like he’s risen high above the clouds, light as a feather. And he continues to rise still when Soonyoung deepens the kiss, pressing his whole body into his. But even standing on the clouds has never made Wonwoo this dizzy.

 

 

“This doesn’t mean anything, does it?” Soonyoung asks, lips glistening and swollen. “You being a good kisser doesn’t mean we don’t still despise each other,” he rationalizes, after minutes spent kissing the daylights out of Wonwoo, pressed beneath him and against the rattling glacier’s walls.

 

Wonwoo finds it hard to recall himself ever despising Soonyoung, but he humors him, because it’s more comfortable than admitting the obvious truth. “Oh, don’t worry,” he says, “I’d still wring your neck and wear your bear pelt around my shoulders afterwards.”

 

Soonyoung laughs heartily, and begins to lean in for more, and Wonwoo wants his lips, but he needs to slip another word in before he lets Soonyoung take his kisses. “Don’t get much of this in the tundra, do you?”

 

“Doubt you ever did in your dungeon,” Soonyoung snaps back, referring to his laboratory back home, where their very first meeting took place.

 

The wall behind them begins to tremble, Wonwoo feeling it shift and move beneath his hands. They should have carried on with their walk a while ago. He wonders what Junhui and Jihoon have been doing during their absence.

 

“Maybe now’s not the grandest time for this,” he says, parting from Soonyoung’s slick, dark pink lips.

 

The wall behind him is crumbling, chips of ice beginning to fall from it, but still it takes Soonyoung a second of defiance before he realizes that it isn’t. Now’s not the time to shut the world out, stop time, and kiss, not with the gods chasing them and the world winding down. “Maybe you’re right.”

 

“I always am.”

 

“Oh, shut up.”

 

 

The last stretch of the passageway seems to have collapsed due to the rumbling destruction outside, making things slower than they need to be. Fault-lines stretch across the thin, melting ice. There are new crags in the glacier, through which they can catch glimpses of the flames and the craters and the blood-red sky, and new crevasses cutting into the ground, chasms of blackness that stretch too far below and too widely across.

 

Soonyoung takes Wonwoo’s hand, slipping his fingers between his and squeezing tightly. He wraps his arm around his waist, and under his furs, Wonwoo does the same to him. They count to three before leaping across, in Junhui and Jihoon’s wake.

 

Wonwoo peers through their jagged window to the world, and gasps when he sees two planets, one dark and the other bright, colliding high in the sky, bursting into a million colourless pieces that rain down into the earth.

 

He’s unaware of Soonyoung’s presence until he talks. “I may be fickle about everything, but not about you,” he begins to say, and then he hesitates, and then his voice shrinks down. The words are hard to get out, sticking in his throat. “I think I’ll love you ‘til the end of time.”

 

Wonwoo is haloed in a combination of the reddish light filtering in from outside and the blue glow emanating from the glacier walls. “That doesn’t mean much, all things considered. The world is ending as we speak.”

 

“You know what I meant.”

 

“I do,” Wonwoo smiles, reaching out for his hand.

 

 

It’s been a long, dark night, but dawn is close. Just out of sight, just out of reach. The night may not really be the darkest before dawn, but when you’ve been waiting for the sun to rise and the sky to lighten, the last few minutes, of trying to find an end to the darkness, feel most hopeless.

 

Dark shapes cut into the distant horizon. Snow-glazed towers rise off of a sharp, frosted citadel, a castle carved and cut into a glacier, taller and older than the one they’d just escaped. The sight is familiar to Wonwoo, who saw it through his hologram, and most familiar to Junhui and Soonyoung, both having spent portions of their lifetimes within it, and Jihoon has heard enough about it from the three of them to piece it together without breaking the heavy silence.

 

Soonyoung hides his gentle trembling beneath his furs. He keeps swallowing the lump growing in his throat, and it keeps coming back and making it harder to breathe. Now’s the moment everything has bubbled and boiled down to, and now’s the moment where he learns whether or not trusting Junhui was a mistake. He’s ready for Junhui to turn on him, because of veiled spite, because of what his parents did all those years ago.

 

Adrift on a piece of melting ice, floating farther and farther from the snowy shoreline. The light left from the fallen stars burning out is the only reason they can see, little fires that speckle the tundra, and the bright, burning meteors replacing the stars in the sky glint off the water.

 

And then, when they’re isolated and surrounded by still water, streaks of the sky begin to shimmer, as though invisible hands were lighting them up like strings and candles. Ribbons of blue, green, and purple swirl and stretch, leaving trails and splatters of glow across their horizon. They stretch down to meet them, engulfing their lonely little island, lights so bright and so blinding that everything beyond them becomes a hazy blur.

 

The northern lights carry chips of sky, and they stretch from above to meet them on the earth, linking the two together for the first and only time.

 

Jihoon presses his hand to Junhui’s lower back and pushes him out, and Junhui stumbles. He cranes his neck to look at the ribbons of hot, vivid light stretching into the open heavens above and pouring down onto them. He takes the crown, and nearly drops it, and then he fumbles with the many straps of his belts, trying to unhook the small pouch he’s carried with him since the first day they met.

 

It comes undone, and he opens the cinch, and lifts out the purple jewel. The one his mother gave him, a broken chip of the crown, a symbol of his right to the throne and his royal lineage. Impossible to erase, no matter his lifetime of circumstances.

 

Junhui fits it into the hollow, empty grooves of the crown, and holds it up, watching it begin to glow faintly. At first he thinks it’s just the effect of the northern lights, playing tricks on his eyes, but then the glow fades, and when he lowers the crown, the jewels are sealed tightly in place, as though they never were cracked or broken.

 

Jihoon has to remind him to place it on his head, where it belongs.

 

The sky behind the mountains begins to lighten. Beams of weak white light, of day breaking, the sun coming out after years of darkness and cold. The crown on Junhui’s head brings fire to empty hearths and warmth to cold hearts. Distant birds are singing, for the first time in so long that Soonyoung has forgotten what their songs sound like.

 

Somewhere far away, the tear in the earth is brought together and sewn shut. Everywhere, surrounding them, along every path they walked to arrive here, the wraiths and shadows disappear, melting back into the soil.

 

Then Soonyoung’s body begins to fade, shredding away in the wind, his tips and corners becoming wisps that pick up and fly away, like snowflakes, like dead leaves. And Wonwoo grabs onto him, so tightly that it seems hard to envision ever letting go. He won’t allow them to take him, no matter how hard they try.

 

“I was good, for once,” Soonyoung breathes, laughing. The tears, bitter, angry tears, freeze as they trickle out of his eyes, tiny snow-drops on his cheeks. “I did the right thing. I gave him the crown, I stepped down. And still you want to kill me?” Fog plumes from his lips, and his voice thunders and cracks. “Suppose I’ll always be doing something wrong, even if I try my best. Where’s the justice?”

 

Even Jihoon seems upset. Junhui barters with the gods. The lights surrounding them grow hotter and brighter, blinding and uncomfortable.

 

Wonwoo clings to Soonyoung, tethering him to the earth and keeping him from the heavens. “’The only person who’ll look out for me is myself’. Remember when you said that?” He whispers into Soonyoung’s ear, wiping his cold tears away. “Do you really still believe that?”

 

Soonyoung doesn’t. He knows Junhui’s persistence is the only thing keeping the gods’ decision from being final. And he knows Wonwoo’s touch is the only thing keeping him from being buried under chain and soil.

 

Junhui tells them he won’t take the throne unless they spare Soonyoung. The sky- what remains of it- rumbles in protest.

 

Exile him. Strip him of his magic and cut him from his familiar. Banish him to a world far from the one he knows. That’s the only way they’ll agree to sparing his life and granting him freedom, and the only thing they’ll settle for when it comes to honoring Junhui and his wishes.

 

“I’ll go with him,” Wonwoo says, and he sees Soonyoung turning to look at him, certainly in disbelief, but his eyes are fixed on a point above, a beam of purple light.

 

“No,” Jihoon cuts him down immediately, his voice harsh in the way it usually becomes only when it’s a matter as heavy as life or death. “You can’t.”

 

Wonwoo can’t look him in the eye for long, because he sees the waver behind the harshness, and he sees that Jihoon is close to crying, and he knows he won’t be able to hold back if he sees Jihoon’s eyes welling up. “I can, Jihoon. I need to.”

 

It takes two deep breaths (that replenish nothing) for Wonwoo to be out of Soonyoung’s arms and crushed between Jihoon’s. He embraces him with too much force, as uncomfortably tight as the twisting in his chest and the hardness choking his throat are.

 

Wonwoo wants to say something, anything, into Jihoon’s ear, and he knows he’ll regret the silence, but he gets his fill of it and of Jihoon’s closeness first. He tries to pocket away every little thing about this moment, just as he pocketed away every little thing he’s known about Jihoon over the years. “Promise me you’ll find your happy ending, whether it involves him or not,” Wonwoo ends up saying.

 

They part, and Jihoon looks over his shoulder at Junhui in his mended crown. For a split-second, he smiles. And Wonwoo knows things will be alright. For both of them. He trusts Junhui to take care of Jihoon in ways that no one else may know how to.

 

“And you. You’re sure you’re going to be happy with him?” Jihoon asks, skeptical even at the last second.

 

“I’m very sure,” Wonwoo responds, and he hugs him one last time. Tears burn at the corners of Jihoon’s eyes, but he wipes them hastily with the backs of his hands before they break apart, making sure Wonwoo doesn’t see them.

 

Then Wonwoo returns to Soonyoung’s side. Wonwoo grips his furs and his flesh, and Soonyoung’s hand is wrapped so tightly over his that he thinks his fingers may be breaking. Soonyoung and Wonwoo are taken in a flurry, in the blink of an eye, into the lakes that travel through time.

 

 

When the ribbons of light dim and fade, Jihoon and Junhui find themselves in an empty throne room. Everything is white marble, snow, and glass, untouched and untouchable. A wind blows through the room, coming in from the wide, empty courtyard, scattering flecks of snow across the carpet.

 

For the first time ever, Jihoon doesn’t have Wonwoo flanking him, watching his back, mirroring his words. He stands alone. He doesn’t want to be told that things will be alright, and he doesn’t want to even think about where Wonwoo may be right now, and whether or not he’s safe. Jihoon’s vision keeps blurring, and he keeps blinking clarity back.

 

This isn’t how he expected their journey to end. It’s a new beginning, but Jihoon finds himself stuck at the end of the road.

 

Junhui fidgets in the throne. It’s no longer built on a foundation of twisted bones, and icicles no longer adorn it. It’s just a curving silver chair, upholstered with velvet that matches that of his crown, which sits perfectly still on his head despite his twisting and turning. “Do I look strange?” He asks, when he catches Jihoon’s eye.

 

“No.” Jihoon isn’t happy. Junhui is a king now, and he looks beautiful sitting in his throne, as though it was made for no purpose other than to hold him, head high and back straight and arms stretched along its sides.

 

But this is what Jihoon was afraid of all along. Corruption, at this unprecedented, newfound power being handed to him, the golden spoon of the gods, an entire monarchy under his command. He fears it’ll eat away at Junhui, stripping him of all his goodness and leaving him a shell of what he knows him to be.

 

And he cares so much. He’s coming to accept why and how he’s grown to care so much for someone so oddly- so absolutely- different from himself, the last person on earth that he’d expect to fill the gaps and hollows within him. But he thinks there’s no point in accepting it, and letting himself fall, because Junhui will be in this castle now, and he’ll never see him so long as he’s a king. Jihoon knows it’s selfish, but he can’t help the bitterness that he feels at this journey’s end, with nothing having worked in his favour.

 

“I don’t think it suits me, to be honest,” Junhui tells him, rising from the throne and coming down the steps. “And I don’t think I can stand being here for much longer.” He’s talking about the throne, and the castle, and this icy peninsula.

 

It doesn’t feel like a victory to either of them. There’s nothing fulfilling about saving the world. There’s nothing in it for the saviors, it seems.

 

Junhui takes the crown off and places it on Jihoon’s head, in one swift motion. Jihoon tries to shy away, but Junhui has an upper hand. He ends up standing there, reddening under its decadent weight, stiff and sulking.

 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

 

“It’s my crown, so I can do what I please with it,” Junhui says, lightening and loosening up. “And I think it suits you better than it could ever suit me.”

 

He places a hand on Jihoon’s shoulder, and a rush of feelings flows through Jihoon. He’s a bit tense, a bit stiff, and a bit expectant.

 

Junhui leans down, his other hand making its way to the curving small of Jihoon’s back, settling comfortably there. Jihoon doesn’t try to pull away, closing his eyes and tilting his head back and allowing himself to bask for a moment.

 

The tears begin to spill despite his attempts at swallowing them, and Jihoon lets Junhui kiss every stain on his cheeks, soft as a moth’s fluttering wings.

 

Then Jihoon regains his composure and his footing, and he steps out of Junhui’s shadow, letting his gentle, stable hands fall back to his sides. He removes the crown and forces it back into his hands. “So…” he echoes around the hall, “this is where I’ll come if I want to find you?”

 

“You know I can’t live here,” Junhui says. He startles Jihoon by tossing the crown so that it clatters and clangs quite loudly, leaving a ringing in their ears, rolling away down the winding marbled hall. “And I know you can’t live without me.”

 

Jihoon’s warning him to be quiet, even though they’re very alone. But his lips betray his amusement, and for once, he finds it hard to stifle his smile. “I’m going to do my best to rebuild the airship.”

 

“And I’m going to ask you to take me many places once you do,” he responds. Jihoon stands on the tips of his toes, and Junhui lowers his head to meet him.

 

 

Jihoon is walking along the rocky shoreline of one of the great lakes. He tries to peer into their depths, hoping to reach through into the other side somehow, to find out at the very least if Wonwoo is alright out there. He doesn’t see anything but his own reflection, with his ermine hanging from his shoulder, but it’s not like he expected an answer.

 

The high, rich sunlight is blinding, and he stumbles over a pebble, but Junhui and his fox are always one step behind him. Junhui’s always there to catch him and pull him close, into his arms, into his chest.

 

 

 

“Well, we’re not dead.”

 

“Yes, but at what cost, Wonwoo? Anyway, you don’t know what death looks like. Speaking from experience-”

 

In the few seconds it took them to travel across worlds and through time, they had been clinging to each other. Now they’re somewhere pitch-black, and they separate, feeling their way around the closed space, floorboards creaking beneath their feet.

 

Wonwoo’s hand runs along the peeling wallpapers. Eventually, he finds a small, cold lever, and upon pulling it, the ceiling lights up, revealing a musty, abandoned bedroom. The windows are boarded shut, but Wonwoo looks through the gaps in the boards and sees a glade of grey trees.

 

Upon seeing Soonyoung in the light, small and disheveled and lost, Wonwoo forgets about any insignificancies he’d wanted to voice, and runs towards him, engulfing him in a hug so strong and so whirling that they end up spinning where they stand, stumbling and catching themselves against the wall.

 

“What’s this for?” He’s flustered, more lost than before.

 

“I’m so glad you’re alive, Soonyoung,” Wonwoo says, overwhelming Soonyoung once again, with his words, his warmth, and the warmth of his words. It dawns on him that, despite the circumstances, and this strange house they’ve found themselves in, he and Wonwoo are finally alone together. Undisturbed. No longer being chased or hunted. Safe and alone, for the time being.

 

Soonyoung lifts Wonwoo in the air, as feather-light as he always was. He hooks one of his arms beneath his shoulders, and the other beneath his knees, and carries him towards the bed. It’s more of a ripped, discoloured mattress than a bed, but it’ll do. For the time being.

 

Soonyoung sets Wonwoo down, and follows him on his knees, collapsing atop him the minute he sinks into the mattress. He wraps his legs around his hips, and presses into his lap, nose tip brushing against his.

 

Wonwoo’s hands find their way to Soonyoung’s neck, stroking the tiny hairs on his nape. Wonwoo’s touch makes the prince of ice shiver, goosebumps erupting visibly along his arms. “How badly have you wanted me all this time, Soonyoung?”

 

Soonyoung groans quietly. He doesn’t even want to think about it, not with Wonwoo waiting beneath him, finally within his reach. “Just let me kiss you.”

 

Wonwoo chuckles and tilts his head up, letting Soonyoung’s full, tender lips melt into his own. This kiss makes up for their first few, which were stolen and tentative. His fingers twist and tangle through his white hair as he kisses more and more of him, hungry and greedy. He can’t get enough, and every time Soonyoung moves away, he presses forward, wanting nothing more than the taste of his lips against his own.

 

Wonwoo’s tongue is warm and pink, and he leaves patterns on Soonyoung’s skin, far from the snowflakes; more colourful, more vivid and passionate, but decorating his collarbones, his shoulders, his stomach, his thighs, all the same.

 

Soonyoung finds two tiny scars beneath his shoulder-blades, where his wings were ripped and his flesh sewn shut when he was sent down all those years ago. Soonyoung’s hands make Wonwoo tremble and shiver, gasping and sighing. In Soonyoung’s arms, he rises high above the clouds. In Soonyoung’s arms, he sees stars. White stars that glitter on the backs of his eyelids.

 

 

Morning sun shafts sideways through the open window above their bed. Wonwoo’s wrapped in a wrinkled white sheet, on his side, hand over his eyes to shield them from the light.

 

Soonyoung stretches and yawns. He’s been awake since sunrise- he has no experience sleeping through such bright, disrupting light, and he finds it incredible how Wonwoo can tuck his head beneath the pillow and sleep through it.

 

He comes closer, embracing Wonwoo from behind, wrapping his legs over his, pressing cold toes to his calves so he groans and tries to roll away. “Wonwoo,” he coos, sweeter than ever before. Wonwoo opens his eyes, squinting and rubbing the sleep-dust away as he turns to look at him. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

 

“I assumed as much,” Wonwoo replies, his voice so warm and tired. Lazy, relaxed, deep in a way he thinks no one else has had the privilege of hearing.

 

“So do you love me back?”

 

“Isn’t it a bit late to be asking that now?” With his bare back pressed into Soonyoung’s stomach, and their arms and legs twined together? Soonyoung’s lips on his neck, and his breath on his cheek? It’s long overdue. “Maybe I do,” he finally replies, smiling up at him, making him laugh.

 

Soonyoung’s fingertips are ice-capped when he prods at Wonwoo’s supple back, trying to keep him awake. He pokes and prods and shakes, but Wonwoo can’t find it in him to be annoyed. “Let’s go back, Wonwoo.”

 

“Go back?”

 

“I kind of miss them,” Soonyoung says, rising up and taking the sheet with him, leaving Wonwoo bare and cold. It falls off of him, revealing traces of redness and marks of kisses patterned along his neck, his clavicles, and the pointed tips of his shoulders.

 

“Isn’t this, well, not the best time to talk about it? Considering we just-”

 

“I know you miss him a lot, Wonwoo,” Soonyoung interrupts, snuffing Wonwoo out. He’d hoped he hadn’t made it obvious, because the last thing he wanted to do was make Soonyoung feel guilty, but Soonyoung seems to have sensed his sadness anyway. Wonwoo is the one who decided to come with him, and he was, and is, aware of what being cast into another world entails.

 

“But how will we go back?”

 

“The same way we came.”

 

“But your magic-”

 

“Yes. The thing about that is,” Soonyoung interrupts him once again, spreading his hands and holding them palms-up for Wonwoo to see, “I think I’ve still got some magic in me.” The tips of his fingers are blue, and frost and snowflakes are beginning to spread along his skin once again, intricacies lacing up his hands and arms.

 

If he defied the gods, all-powerful and divine as they are, once before- by being sentenced to death, and resurrecting himself from the underworld by force- then it’s not impossible for him to have done it again. And he has, and he will continue to.

 

He nuzzles and kisses his way into Wonwoo’s arms, and once he’s there, he forces him out of his slumber, forcing Wonwoo into sitting upright. “It all sounds very deadly and very dangerous to me,” Wonwoo finally musters. Soonyoung plays with his hair, causing a frosty sheen to form, and Wonwoo shakes it off, sending flecks of it across the room.

 

“Wouldn’t you rather suffer the consequences of doing something highly forbidden with them by your side, than stay stuck in a boring place like this?”

 

“You just can’t keep your hands out of trouble, can you?” Wonwoo rolls his eyes, pushing Soonyoung away. “You love the thrill of breaking the rules, and you’re going to stretch it too far this time. I know it. The gods can only forgive you so many times.”

 

Soonyoung is smug, licking his lips and narrowing his eyes, pretending he didn’t hear a word Wonwoo said. He lets it all wash over him and fly over his head. He stands up, and holds his hand out, looking down at Wonwoo. “So are you coming or not?”

 

Wonwoo yawns, puts his hand in his, and lets Soonyoung pull him onto his feet.

 

Soonyoung leads him towards the door. Before he puts his hand on the doorknob, he mumbles foreign words under his breath, sweet incantations that Wonwoo doesn’t understand. Then he grips it and twists, and Wonwoo sees it glow softly beneath his fingers.

 

The door swings open. A harrowing, withering wind greets them, as does the sight of a glassy lake. The tundra spreads out before their eyes, speckled with wildflowers and snow.

 

 

_Ice will crawl from the depths of the earth,_

 

_Four will gather where lights kiss the hearth._

 

_Skies cry blood, when the stars scatter,_

 

_Oceans run dry, when the moons shatter._

 

 

_Rise, with white hide on his back,_

  
_With him the underworld will crack._

  
_With him cursed blood will rule,_

  
_Until true prince brings spell and jewel._

 

 

_Only then will two worlds meet,_

  
_Only then will gods’ wrath cease… and repeat._

 

 

**THE END**

**Author's Note:**

> Wow. Wow!!! thanks so much for reading all of that, and i sure do hope you enjoyed it!!!!!!
> 
> i had the best time writing it (i'm serious), and it's one of the best (and personal favourite) things i think i've ever written, if only judging by how much fun i had throughout the entire process.
> 
> some notes:  
> \- the technical etymological definition of the word arctic is "near the bear", because arktos is greek for bear, and ursa major is a constellation in the northern sky. i would just like to point that out, in relation to soonyoung being a polar bear and the prince of snow and arctic and all.  
> \- i think i made it very clear but just in case. soonyoung is a demon, his parents were demons. wonwoo and jihoon are seraphim or fallen angels or something like that (fallen seraphim?). junhui is genuine royalty  
> \- jeonghan is the guy jisoo's borrowing the book from. jeonghan wrote the prophecy. jeonghan is also one of the spirits of the mountain pass. i had a jihan subplot in mind, but i ended up too tired to stick to it. maybe i'll write a short story with what i originally wanted to include. also, mingyu and minghao were supposed to have a subplot wherein they were represented by two planets that orbit and therefore cannot meet, but i scrapped that. but if you pay attention, there are two planets that collided when wonwoo was looking out at the sky... that's them. 
> 
> anyway:  
> writing this fic was incredibly time-consuming, lengthy, and exhausting, but i would do it again in a heartbeat, because it was so so so so so so much fun... and i'm fairly happy with it, but maybe i'm just happy about finally getting it out the door and i'm muddling that with self-satisfaction. anyway, yes. i enjoyed it so much, and i lost so much sleep and composure while writing it. i hope it's as enjoyable to you as it was/is to me, and the only thing that would make me happier would be to hear what you think of it in a comment! thanks so, so much for reading! cheers!


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